Play Things is SA’s hottest showcase of new work!

Doors Open: 5pm

5:30pm - 6:30pm: Networking

7:00pm - 8:30pm: Show

Ticket Price:

R80 - student

R120 - online

R150 - door

If you’d like to sign up, here’s the application link: https://forms.gle/QUKW4entqwv7N9Pf7

Monologues, sketch, magic, comedy, script-readings, clown and more. Catch your favourite big name performers’ works-in-progress before they become fully fledged plays, or discover new talent before they hit the big time.

Founded at the Alexander Bar in 2015, Play Things has been running for over 10 years. From packed houses at theatres around Cape Town, to the theatre festivals likeNational Arts Festival and the KKNK, Play Things is THE Spot to spend your night with a delightful bouquet of variety performances. It’s a vital space for development, risk-taking, and creative connection.

The format is simple but powerful: no gatekeeping, just a stage, a mic, and an audience ready to witness something new. Past performers include rising stars and established names, with the likes of Lauren Beukes and Yaaseen Barnes having graced our lineups. The result is an electric, one-of-a-kind evening where anything can happen—and often does. Artists consistently rave about the impact of this space:

“Play Things is such a fundamental need for artists! The work they do by giving so many different types of performance art a platform is incredible and integral to the growth and sustainability of performance in South Africa.” – Robyn Dunlop

“Creating art is scary... Play Things affords artists a safe, reliable space to play, craft, and learn.It was one of the main driving forces behind my one-person show.” – Samantha Carlisle

Come for the wild variety, stay for the vibrant community. Play Things is where performance lives, breathes, and evolves.

Who would have believed that a simple act of switching on a car radio could change the course of your life!?

In the darkness, a car pulls up at a street lamp. Eddie steps out into the void, to confront the horror of his own fears. He stops at the place where, almost 30 years ago, the universe shifted … the night he became hopelessly lost. Haunted by an event that changed everything, he begins to find words to name it. A miracle happens, but perhaps not in the way you might expect. Eddie du Pisanie - a forty-nine year old East Rand salesman - is retrenched and decides life is no longer worth living. He writes a suicide note to his wife and is about to gas himself in his car in the garage, when he switches on the car radio. The Elvis Presley song he hears does more than take him back 30 years - it recalls an event in his childhood that changed his life forever. Abandoning - for the moment - the idea of suicide, he drives the 200 kilometre journey to the town in which he grew up, to a lamp post opposite the ex-Carlton Bioscope in Witbank. Can we change our own destinies...? “Elvis” du Pisanie is about to find out…

PUBLISHED REVIEWS

‘Ashley Dowds delivers a tender and nuanced performance in The Return of Elvis Pisane’ - THE CAPE ROBYN

‘Theatre doesn’t get much more brilliant than Elvis Du Pisanie’ - BIANCA COLEMAN

‘gritty, funny, tragic, universal and something that will bring you to the brink of tears in all its dimensions’ - ROBYN SASSEN

‘Staan terug, of 'n vuishou gaan jou tref!’ - BEELD, AJ OPPERMAN

“from the whisper under lamppost until the reunion with the King of Rock and role...I was mesmerized by the greatness of the Word and Performance...."THE RETURN OF ELVIS DU PISANIE"   is THEATRICAL PERFECTION.  Sylvain Strike

‘It is worth saying clearly: this is a show about a man who has written a suicide note. It begins in a dark place. But Slabolepszy and Dowds handle that darkness with such honesty and, ultimately, such generosity of spirit, that the journey through it becomes something genuinely uplifting. You leave not with heaviness but with something closer to gratitude for the past, for the moments that shaped you, and for the fact that someone put this story back on a stage.’

BARRY MORISSE 

Written by Mike van Graan and performed by John Maytham, this inspiring one-man show uses the story of South African rugby as a powerful lens through which to explore the country’s own journey. Blending storytelling, humour and drama, it traces the parallel growth of a nation, a rugby team and one ordinary South African, asking what the values that built a world champion might teach us about building a stronger country.

FROM THE WRITER OF BUCKET BOY AND APPLE FACE COMES A THRILLING NEW INDIE COMEDY.

Written and directed by Pierre Malherbe, WOLF BISCUIT is an absurdist two-hander bro-mantic comedy-drama starring Andrew Roux and Brett Williams. Roux and Williams play work colleagues trying to survive in a cut-throat industry and navigate their love/hate relationship. These intrepid characters will take you on a surreal journey through betrayal, deception, and different-sized coffee mugs.

If you’ve ever put a shoe in a postbox, spilled beer on a Labrador, or placed a baguette in a car boot in Kraaifontein, then WOLF BISCUIT is the life-altering show you’ve been waiting for.

Malherbe’s darkly comedic production toys with the fragility of uneasy companionship, balancing the mundane and the menacing, pulling the audience into a bizarre and unpredictable world for an experience that is as unsettling as it is hilarious.

PLEASE BE AWARE THAT THIS PRODUCTION IS PERFORMED IN AFRIKAANS

Winner of five awards at the Momentum Aardklop 2025, including Best Theatre Production, Best Actor, Director and Audience Favourite.

Winner of the Woordfees award for Best One-Person Show at the Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees 2025.

In Seun, Dana Snyman shares the part of his story he has never spoken about: his experiences in the 1980s. This was the era of P.W. Botha's finger pointing, the Voëlvry tour, AWB rallies, negotiations, and the last days of conscription. Dana is dishonourably discharged from the army, but not before a stint in Ward 24. This raw, revealing memoir asks: How does a boy become a man? A boy who can't catch a girl's attention? A boy who isn't good enough for the army? Seun is a moving account of coming of age during the death throes of a political system, about masculinity and honour, and about the love that ultimately overcomes it all.

Beautifully directed by the award winning Nico Scheepers ( The Glass Menagerie/ Speelgoed van Glas, Nêrens- Noordkaap) adapted by Johann Smith( Die reuk van appels)