Isitha Sabantu
“Isitha Sabantu is a tough watch because there is a lot to process – on every level and for the duration of the piece. But if you invest, it gives you rewards of such profound meaning and, ultimately, beauty, you might need as much time again after the show to process what you have seen while the lights were down. Astounding.”
Bruce Dennill, Theate Review.
“Playing astutely with scale…the production team take the somewhat small space of the Mannie Manim Theatre and render it vast in its sense of landscape, and overwhelming in its sense of horror. It’s an extraordinary work which shifts the boundaries and the bars of what can be done with theatre…”
“A deeply moving and powerfully gripping experience. It was bittersweet to surrender to its storytelling rhythms. Empatheatre has given us a brilliant gift.”
Louis Gaiher- Wits University Press Editor
Robyn Sassen, Theatre Review
“Isitha Sabantu, which has four shows left in an extended run at The Market Theatre in Johannesburg, is profound theatre. I’ve now seen it twice – once at the invitation of Bulelwa Mabasa, and also with my sixteen-year-old son. It’s technically and creatively brilliant, and often astonishingly so, as well as being ethically and politically serious without being didactic. I don’t know anyone who has seen it who has not found it wholly compelling.”
Prof Richard Pithouse- Research Fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies
“The production features bits of everything – straight theatre, gorgeous choral ensemble singing, music, intricate puppet work, miniature sets and physical theatre, all linked with complex bilingual dialogue, characters that are sometimes good and bad in the same arc and interactions with both set elements (beach sand, notably) and the audience (briefly breaking the fourth wall). All of these components are superbly crafted and brilliantly rehearsed and prepared for, resulting in a cast – of 12 – that, while each character is sharply defined, feels like it operates as a lithe, shifting and multidimensional organism.”
Bruce Denhill, Theatre Review.
“Isitha Sabantu is an African Greek Tragedy both epic in scale and vision.”
Kyla Davis- Director of Well Worn Theatre company
“Isitha Sabantu is an extraordinary, epic and enthralling experience.”
Bianca Amato- Artistic Director of The Quickening Theatre Company
“Astounding, compelling and heart bruising”
Samsays Theatre Review
“Gut wrenching, poignant and spell binding. Isitha Sabantu ranks as one of the most memorable productions I have seen.”
Liz at Lancaster theatre review
“The production is extraordinary, powerful, emotional and beautifully staged. It reminds us that the struggle for encironmental justice is not abstract. It is lived daily by communities across South Africa.”
MACUA (mining affected communities in United action)
“What unfolds is not simply a story about mining. It is a story about power. About truth. About what happens when a community must decide what matters most. And after the final bow, the question begins to form in your mind – slowly, quietly – who is the real enemy of the people? This is theatre that asks us to listen carefully – to the land, to each other, and to the quiet voice that sometimes stands alone in a room full of certainty. Empatheatre has created something deeply human, beautifully observed and profoundly relevant.”
Samsays Theatre Review
‘This production is perhaps one of the most articulate examples of the contradictions in the land debate and requires urgent and focused attention.”
Fezokuhle Mthonti– Mail & Guardian Theatre Review
‘What if a hole in a table could indicate the terror of land mass being moved? What if a beautiful choir’s voice in cohesion could articulate the threat of drilling? What if simple chairs lifted and moved across the stage could create a sense of havoc that makes you want to hide? What if that fourth wall could be broken in a way which makes the audience not feel afraid, but rather complicit in the wisdom of the tale? What if there is a musician onstage whose music talks to the performers, rather than a whole orchestra in an electronic sound track? What if the story were told in isiZulu, but is magicked to be understandable in English? Every one of these issues is not only engaged with, but celebrated.’
Robyn Sassen Theatre Review
“All the cultural collaborators form part of the nexus of Empatheatre and Iben Scope. As the winner of the 2024 Ibsen Scope Grants, Isitha Sabantu is a triumph of a show which has sensitively fused multi-idiomatic disciplines including praise poetry, maskandi, choral song and puppetry. As they note in their programming note, the show “invites audiences to a world where justice is more than a legal ideal but a deeply ecological, spiritual and communal practice”. What is perhaps most compelling about the piece is the poetic isiZulu prose that accompanies the story. The writing is full-parts hilarious, dripping in misogynistic violence, careful and full of the polite double speak of isiZulu bureaucracy. It is in many ways, attentive to the mandate of the artistic and political subject which is to establish an archive which accounts for the production and reproduction of socio-histories of previously colonised subjects. The play in many ways is also an example of the process of decolonisation, which is about an uncovering of past socio-histories; it is effectively the resistance of the negated subject who rejects the fragmented, colourless story that has been presented to them by the coloniser.”
Fezokuhle Mthonti– Mail & Guardian theatre review
“By staging Mam Fikile’s story, Isitha Sabantu does something that formal legal processes rarely achieve for communities like hers: it creates a durable, public record that cannot be lost in procedural delay or dismissed on a technicality. The script endures as evidence. Each performance is a re-opening of proceedings.The script is not merely a dramatisation of her story; it functions as a form of legal testimony. The theatre becomes a legal forum. Fikile expressed an understanding of the world in which land, life, and water were not commodities to be traded off against mining royalties and environmental impact assessments. The legal system she encountered spoke a different normative language entirely, one in which her values were legible only as obstacles to be procedurally managed. The play refuses that translation. It insists on making the community’s legal world visible, not as a deviation from official law but as a rival and more legitimate account of what law, in this place, does mean”
Dr Dina Lupin talk presented at LitFest 2026: Acts of Resistance
