SHOCKWAVE at the Market Theatre: A Warm House in a Country on Fire
Chantal Stanfield’s new play runs in the Mannie Manim Theatre until 8 November, and Pride Month is the right time to see it.
The first thing SHOCKWAVE does is make you feel welcome. When I took my seat, the set had the lived-in warmth of someone’s actual home, the kind of room where you expect to be offered tea before you have even taken your shoes off. The play follows Larry, played by Trevor Lynch, a closeted young librarian on the Cape Flats in the 1980s. He is a Coloured man, and he is gay, in a country that polices both. Larry is forced to board with Sister Debbie, a deeply religious widow. As Larry grew comfortable in her house, I grew comfortable in the theatre at the same pace. By the time the play started taking that comfort apart, I had no defences left.
Pulled Into the Fire
That is where the technical team earns its credit. The sound, smoke and lighting pull the audience out of the cosy room and into the world outside it. A South Africa under the State of Emergency, with police Casspirs on the corners and violence close to every household. This is apartheid, so Larry’s race determines where he can live, how he is treated and how safe he is on the street. Homosexuality was also illegal, and the so-called “gay plague” had added a new layer of fear to an already violent time. The house is warm, the street is dangerous, and Larry is caught between the two.
The People in the Room
The playwright, Stanfield writes people shaped by fear, faith and silence, and she doesn’t let us settle on a single reaction. Lois du Plessis plays Sister Susan, the church tannie in a three-piece suit in the kind of nasty heels that make every other church mother jealous. She is a Coloured elder in the same church as Sister Debbie, and she represents a community that has survived the system by holding tightly to respectability. That means the judgement Larry faces comes from his own people, which carries a different weight from the oppression outside.
Duane Behrens plays Herb, Larry’s white gay colleague, who seems unaware of the time and place he lives in. He talks about partying up and down Long Street while Larry cannot get to work without being frisked by the police for simply existing. Herb’s lifestyle felt foreign to me, and my instinct was right: he turns out to be a Brit. He is the most uncomfortable part of the play, dangled in front of Larry like a carrot. I was glad that Larry does not bite, or at least not completely.
Renate Stuurman plays the lovable Sister Debbie. Her husband has passed away, and she has no children. So, when someone suggested that she rent out the room in her house, she jumped at the idea because she craved company, with the extra cash as a bonus. Watching her bond with the awkward Larry, who had been thrown out of his parents’ house for being gay, was healing. I wanted this devoutly churchgoing woman to stand up to Sister Susan and to society and become Larry’s protector. We loved her as she is, which is why, when she called Larry a sodomite, I knew I was not the only person in the auditorium who gasped. In that moment, we were all ready to go to war for a man who could not catch a break anywhere.
Director David Dennis balances all of this with humour and the characters’ shared love of the band The Invaders, so the heavy scenes land on people we have already come to care about.
When the lights went down, I wanted more. I wanted Larry to be all right, and I wanted to know what happened next. I walked out feeling hopeful and saddened in the same breath by how things turned out for him. The part that stayed with me longest was my excitement for his next chapter, in a new place with new adventures ahead of him. I found myself hoping that, wherever he ended up, it would smell better than the South Africa he was leaving. That is how I would describe the whole evening: bittersweet.
Why This Play, and Why Now
South Africa observes Pride Month in October, and the Market Theatre has made SHOCKWAVE the anchor of its first Queer Festival. Artistic Director Greg Homann, who worked as dramaturg with Stanfield during the early development of the play, describes it as moving from the widespread protests of the era to the restrictions placed on people’s personal intimacies. We usually tell the story of the State of Emergency through race alone, and SHOCKWAVE shows what that history looks like for someone who is Coloured and gay, with fear coming from the state, the church and his own community. Watching Larry get frisked for existing in a theatre with its own long record of confronting apartheid made that history feel close. Dennis says the play matters especially to young people who need context for how we got here. A country that celebrates queer lives today should know what it cost to reach this point.
SHOCKWAVE runs at the Mannie Manim Theatre in Newtown, Johannesburg, until 8 November 2026, so there is still time to see it. Tickets start at R110 on Webtickets, with discounts for groups of four or more, and every Wednesday is half-price. Secure underground parking is available at Newtown Junction.
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