Andrew Buckland and the alchemy of laughter

Daily Maverick

4 days ago

Revived with a young cast, the playwright's latest production at the Baxter uses physical comedy to grapple with the many brutal, horrifying ways that food remains a source of power and control.
National treasure, theatre legend, comedy giant. Call him what you may, but Andrew Buckland has spent his career making people feel. And think.
Often the connections he creates between heart and mind are unanticipated, but what's guaranteed is that, along the way, you will laugh spontaneously, without recourse to cerebral processes, free of interference from self-censoring agents.
'Hopefully we can sit in a room together and give ourselves permission to laugh at ourselves,' he says. 'It seems like a really powerful thing, especially when we consider issues that are extremely dark.'
He calls it 'the cleansing fire of laughter'.
Feedback, his most recent directorial endeavour, is a new iteration of a play he wrote in the early 1990s, earning a national award for best playwright and an Edinburgh Festival Fringe First Award in 1995. In style, it expanded Buckland's somewhat idiosyncratic approach to playmaking which drew on his training in mime and physical theatre.
It also leaned into a mode of comedy that grappled with poignant and pressing issues in ways that veered into absurdism, the grotesque and using visceral humour to make direct emotional connections with the audience. In The Ugly Noo Noo, for example, which had been a major hit several years earlier, he critiqued authoritarianism through the lens of a surreal encounter with a Parktown prawn.
Buckland had previously used the stage to grapple with apartheid and its monsters, but Feedback was in development just as South Africa was on the cusp of democracy and he saw the need to refocus his work. 'There was a strong sense that the targets of political satire of the Seventies and Eighties were shifting and didn't have the same kind of relevance,' he says. 'I made an active, conscious shift to think more broadly and to consider what I saw as humanitarian rights – access to food, access to water.'
He created The Water Juggler (1998), in which he took issue with the politics of water; a few years earlier, Feedback came out of an investigation of food politics, an idea initiated by overhearing a supermarket worker saying that cheeses were 'flying off the shelf'. While a literal image of flying cheeses no doubt sprang to mind, it prompted Buckland to reflect on the fact that, while some folks feast, millions starve.
'The kind of work I was doing at the time was very much set in a satirical, comic, cartoon, surreal world in which anything can happen,' he says.
It occurred to him that, in that world, the notion of flying cheeses was not especially extraordinary. All he had to do was ask the 'obvious' theatrical questions as to the cheeses' motivation. In the case of flying cheese, the questions were clear: Why are they flying? Where are they flying to? And why do they wish to be there?
The response that came to Buckland was that the primary goal of any foodstuff is to be eaten – preferably by someone who is hungry. From that emerged the idea of self-distribution – along with plenty more satirical weirdness.
The play is by no means a documentary analysis of flying cheeses and their motivation, though. It uses a farcical murder mystery framework to explore the complex sociology of food.
The core narrators are a pair of orphans who have survived a famine and have been saved by Mother Mirth, a character who has taught them how to feed themselves using methods such as permaculture. In the play, most food is controlled by a nefarious corporation, the Dearth Foodstuff Multinational, which is run by two eccentrically villainous villains straight from the world of cartoons.
When Mother Mirth is murdered, the orphans team up with a pair of detectives – Deadly and Serious – who take the audience on a wild ride as they hunt down the bad guys.
Within that seemingly familiar whodunnit story arc, the play examines serious ideas about the food industry and about how food is controlled. And, of course, how food is used as a mechanism of power.
'Throughout history, food has been weaponised and used as a weapon of war,' Buckland says. 'Constructed famines and imposed starvation have and are used as weapons of genocide. And it's happening in the world as we speak. Not only in Gaza – in any conflict zone, food and hunger are used as mechanisms of war.'
Without preaching, using satire, physicality and absurdist storytelling, Feedback accesses a mode of communal laughter in order to grapple with issues that are not only part of everyday life (how we source our foods, for example, and the ethics of food generally), but have broad implications for humanity – and our capacity for cruelty.
Buckland believes that comedy is a useful and potent way of facing issues most of us prefer not to confront. 'It's the vital role of the fool,' he says. 'It's the clown that Italian satirist Dario Fo described as a character born with a sword for a tongue, whose role is to ignite the powder kegs of laughter that help us grapple with darker aspects of who we are.'
Originally created as a solo show for himself, and then rewritten as a two-hander, for Feedback's 2025 Baxter revival Buckland rearranged the script for four actors, while maintaining the core features of its original style.
'Its structure, subject matter and characters have essentially remained the same – it's all very much within that style of storytelling without props and without a set, instead using gesture and physicality to evoke landscapes, places and particular objects that the characters deal with.'
Buckland believes this brand of physical performance stimulates the audience's imagination in such a way that they become 'active creative participants' in the storytelling.
'The audience's imagination is directly involved in creating what's not on stage – and what's not said. They don't just listen and observe from the outside in a removed, detached way. Each person in the audience sees their own image, follows their own version of the story, and is stimulated to evoke their own joy and pain and remembrance of their own experiences in life. So, it's a unique, creative conversation with the audience.'
Buckland says the play in a sense becomes an act of co-creation in which the audience are engaged participants. 'There's a complicity, a glint in the eye of two people playing the same game. I love that you can invite the audience into the most surreal landscapes and they happily come with you and imagine it themselves.'
It is not only an invitation into a bizarre, otherworldly reality, though, but a means of using physical comedy to access pre-verbal, instinctive, gut-level responses to what is happening on stage.
It is a satirical mode that, by putting a different light on a thing, its ridiculousness becomes instantly laughable, and is felt viscerally rather than being processed cerebrally. 'So, hopefully the audience will be laughing at something before they've even considered whether it's funny or why it's funny,' says Buckland.
He says, too, that while laughter seems to make it easier for audiences 'to go into that imaginative world' of the often bizarre and surreal worlds that exist in his plays, there is something else about laughter that is inescapable: its alchemical power.
'It had been my experience, particularly doing silent mime shows, that it was possible to do a whole hour or so of performance in complete silence – except for the laughter of the audience. For the entire show, that's the only thing you hear. And that was quite a mystical experience, I suppose. And it was addictive. Because there was a sense that people were laughing not only because it was funny, but because there was an identifiable level of truth in the performance.'
He says it's a vital kind of laughter, because it reveals our inner truth.
And important, too, in that it is laughter 'that does not focus one's attention away from issues, but allows us to laugh by going deeply into them and through them, towards hopefully being able to understand them, or at least consider them from another perspective'.
This ability to show audiences a different perspective lies at the heart of Buckland's belief that theatre and storytelling are mechanisms for practising empathy.
'Feedback is part of a style of work that establishes in the audience an immediate connection with the subject matter,' he says. 'Because it's evoked not through an intellectual consideration of ideas, but through a visceral response. It's more personal and it's a far more effective way of enabling the audience to stand in the other person's shoes. Or to step outside of their own shoes.'
For Buckland, this is urgent work.
'This seems crucial, absolutely vital for every single human being,' he says. 'Especially at a time when many people who have power seem to be devoid of any effective sense of empathy. It seems a really important aspect of humanity for us to learn, to develop, to grow, and to practise.'
Vital, too, he says, is that we keep it real.
'I'm convinced they'll soon be making AI movies where you pretty much can't tell whether it's an actor or an AI-generated character. But there's something about live performance that AI can't replicate. What AI can't fabricate is people sitting in a room together, communicating live, face-to-face. Feedback really relies on people collecting in one space, without interference by screens or technology, and allowing ourselves to be with each other, allowing that to be a part of confronting ourselves.
'That seems very potent, very urgent. A lot might change; we might have crashes of this and that, huge social, political, economic, topographical, climate and every other kind of upheaval, but what won't change is our capacity and our need to tell stories to each other, and to hear stories, and to share stories. That seems at the core of what makes us who we are.' DM
Written and directed by Andrew Buckland, Feedback features Lyle October, Awethu Hleli, Carlo Daniels and Nolufefe Ntshuntshe. It is playing at the Baxter Studio theatre in Cape Town until 30 August.