HAVE YOU EVER watched a small child make art? It’s never about whether things are ‘good enough’ or what level of approval they may garner. It’s about the correct – call it spiritual – place for things to go. Or the correctly coloured crayon to use in a given context, with boldness and fearlessness. In South African stage production, The King of Broken Things, performer Cara Roberts encapsulates this understanding so impeccably, you will feel like you, too, are nine years old. Or thereabouts. It’s an extraordinary piece of theatre and a profound understanding of story-telling currently enjoying its London debut at Riverside Studios until 4 January 2025.

Having enjoyed seasons on South Africa’s theatre festival circuit and in various cities nationally, the show spreads its considerable wings of bits and bobs, thingamees and doo-dads to London, and if you are there right now, or can feasibly be there during its run, this should be a must on your agenda. But be warned. Maybe surrounded by supporting literature or popular opinion which says it’s for children, this is grown up storytelling at its most sophisticated, transformed through the sensibilities of a child into something that has several narrative tales that have the same kind of kick as the horrifying denouement of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. It’s a work that tells a troubling story with the kind of give and take, the two steps forward and ten in a completely different direction, that constitutes the fabric of real narrative, that keeps your focused and doesn’t let go.

Above all, it is about how broken things – be they ceiling fans or bicycle wheels, keyboards from a by-gone era or empty bird cages, rusted over time – can develop a new identity, and have another life punctuated by different metaphors and new idioms, because of their brokenness. It presents a set of values that can also apply to people broken by circumstance, disappointment and loss. It’s about the Japanese concept of kintsugi where broken ceramic is repaired with gold leaf, as much it is about adventure, and above all the beating nexus that can make a curious, sensitive, maybe traumatised child into an artist.

King of Broken Things features an interpretation of a main character that reaches beyond the bounds of stereotype with quietude and boldness, bravery and a quintessential understanding of a young and bruised self. And yet it never bleeds over into foolish or mawkish. It’s beautiful play that will haunt you with important truths. Premised on a gorgeously messy set by Bryan Hiles that engages the magic of analogue mechanics as well as kind of treasures one finds in someone else’s detritus, it may take you back to a childhood, rich with possibility and crusted with hope but also tears. Bring tissues.

• The King of Broken Things is written and directed by Michael Taylor-Broderick. Performed by Cara Roberts, with a set designed by Bryan Hiles, it is onstage at Riverside Studios in London until 5 January 2025.
• This review is premised on a brief season at the work which was staged at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg during June of 2024.