Joe Blog

Secret Ballot is a prequel to J. Bobs Tshabalala’s award-winning play Khongolose Khommanding Khommissars, which Theatreduo directed as its Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Theatre prize production. The play went on to win Tshabalala the Naledi Theatre Award for Best New South African Script. Through political satire and farce, Secret Ballot examines the absurdities and contradictions of political power. Its return to the stage offers an opportunity to revisit Tshabalala’s political world while opening a fresh encounter with the performances, promises and power struggles that shape democratic life.
Political life is deeply theatrical. It depends on spectacle, rhetoric, ceremony, performance and the construction of public identities. Satire allows us to expose these performances, question their authority and confront the distance between political promises and lived realities. Through this staging we are interested in what happens when the absurdity of political life is brought onto the stage, and how humour can become a means of critique without losing sight of the serious questions beneath the laughter.