Two award-winning shows are coming to Cape Town after cutting their teeth at the National Arts Festival
Hot from its run at the National Arts Festival (NAF) in Makhanda, Durban-based performer and comedian Ben Voss will keep asking his audiences if at 50, would anyone still want to watch him?
“I’ve been a bit trepidatious,” he said. “You hit 50 and you’re like, am I relevant at all anymore?”
But his new one-man show, Becoming Benno, was a hit at the festival, winning an Ovation Award.
Now it’s playing in Cape Town and surrounds for a run at Theatre Arts in Observatory, the Drama Factory in Somerset West and the Kalk Bay Theatre, this July.
“This is a show I’ve written from my heart,” Voss said.
“Art is valuable if you are doing it, but even more valuable if people see it.”
The award-winning performer, known to many for his work as the satirical Beauty Ramapelepele, or his Green and Black Mamba comedy shows, which went to the festival over the years, is now performing as a version of himself caught between his SA roots and a new life in Australia.
Saffas longing to fly off into the Aussie sunset for the promise of a safer, better-governed utopia.
“The show is about this dual personality,” he explained.
“One foot in SA, one foot in Australia, and caught in no-man’s-land between two cultures. Do you want to run away from home, or are you moving towards something else? Are you abandoning your life, or just creating new options?”
The show was developed as part of his application for a global talent visa to Australia, which he received with much gratitude in 2024.
“It was after the riots in Durban. I started writing this show and thinking about the 400-plus people dead in the streets, which shocked me as someone with a 10-year-old daughter.”
He’s not interested in people running away from SA, he’s interested in people who are running towards something else.
“SA is not something to run away from,” he said.
“It is a beautiful place and it’s built an entire career for me.
“If you are lucky enough to have the chance, immigration can be about carrying the torch forward.
“That is what this has been for me.”
The production was selected as one of five finalists for the Adelaide Fringe’s Best of the Fest award after winning a weekly category. Voss said many Saffas had been in the audience, cackling to see a satirised version of their own stories retold on stage.
“It is funny, touching, heartfelt, moving, and relevant,” he said, “and a much better use of 55 minutes than sitting on your phone. Or even drinking a beer at a pub.”
An audience member from his final NAF performance, said of the show: “Becoming Benno is a very interesting show. For me, I think it could have been a little bit shorter. That would be the one negative, or maybe I was just tired and not functioning too well.
“I was impressed with the way he pulled four different characters off, which is not an easy thing to do, but he managed that extremely well. It had very authentic, evocative dialogue and really captured the Saffa M.O. and highlighted the nanny state narrative of Australia. And of course, you kept hanging on the edge of your seat throughout the show to find out if he actually made it. In the little subplots like running out of battery on his cell phone and having to stand on a chair in one corner to try and get comms. [These were] all really amazing little hooks that you could relate to in the real world. So overall, you know, I was very positive about it.
“The sad underlying aspect of that for me, personally, is the brain drain. The tens of thousands of people who are abandoning South Africa for greener pastures and I believe South Africa is much poorer for that.”
Becoming Benno plays at Theatre Arts on 23 and 24 July, and at Kalk Bay Theatre on 25 – 27 July.
Another Ovation Award winning show coming to Cape Town from the National Arts Festival is the dating game Love Me, Feed Me, Never Leave Me. It plays at Theatre Arts this weekend, 12 and 13 July.