HOW DO YOU take the life of a man who lived more than four generations before you were born and give him seamless breath in a world coloured by contemporary songs and political cynicism? Daniel Anderson is but 25 and armed with a script by Amanda Bothma, a Hitlerian moustache and a bendy walking stick, he takes on the legend that was Charlie Chaplin and he will leave you with a song in your step and tear in your eye. The Tramp, an extraordinarily sophisticated mix of biography with song, persona with undercurrent, debuts at the Theatre on the Square in Sandton, where it will perform until 27 July. It’s a ten out of ten show!

But don’t expect a songbook of 1920s jazz here. As he did with his work, Vincent, Anderson tears apart the lyrical expectations; his choice of repertoire rests on the complex emotions articulated by the story at hand. Veering between anything from Leroy Anderson’s 1953 iconic Typewriter Song and snippets of Bach, Nena’s 99 Red Balloons from the 1980s some Mozart and a bit of Mendelssohn, not to forget the 1955 song, The Great Pretender (musically arranged in this show by Bryan Schimmel) the repertoire is rich and funny and deep. Structurally, the work resonates with the performed historical narrative model that brought Eva Cassidy to stage under the hand of Kerry Hiles, and gives Chaplin a presence onstage that is both fictional and historical.

By the time he was in his early thirties, Chaplin’s was the most famous face and persona in the western world. His name still makes millions of people smile at the recollection of a clown in their social midst who was everyman, but who had the baggy pants, courage and folly and the clumsiness to blend tragedy with slapstick and won the day. Until he didn’t.

Bothma has crafted a piece of work that takes Chaplin’s alter ego creation, ‘The Tramp’ and puts independent feelings into him. His was the hand that held onto that of six-year-old Charlie’s at the workhouse where he was dumped, when his mother, a stage performer, was institutionalised for insanity. His was the personality that led the way through Chaplin’s audacious filmmaking moves that enabled him to shatter the boundaries of where clowning could lie, dragging it all the way into tragedy.

But it was the Tramp’s presence that was expunged from Chaplin’s oeuvre with The Great Dictator, a 1940 film that for the first time ever, featured Chaplin’s spoken voice. A critical success for talkies which were new on the film scene but a deep failure for the man in the street, The Great Dictator was an outspoken spoof against everything Hitler and represented the beginning of an unsettling era in Chaplin’s life that clashed with the Red Scare, a scandal hungry society and his encounter with the love of his life, Oona O’Neill.

The Tramp is punted as a pocket musical, but it contains a giant heart and an immense ambit which relentlessly peers into a complex life of a man who skirted controversy wherever he went. It’s a contemplation of the contradictions implicit in the universal idea of being a clown, and one which doesn’t pull punches in its reflections on strange political times, rotten with hypocrisy and riddled with a need for social gossip. But by the same token, it’s a potted glance into a life coloured by being sexually attractive, sad and subject to twists of fate that holds you tight with beautiful performances and a technological set that strips the Chaplin name of cliché and gives the touch of analogue the upper hand.

Indeed, on that evocation of high tech contained in allusions to low tech, a celebration of the brilliance of generous collaboration is mandatory. The hand-in-glove relationship between the lighting and the AV tricks and balances is not always something that works in productions of this nature. Mostly, with a lot of tricks being flung onstage your eyes get drawn between projected elements and your brain doesn’t always know how to look at the performed elements as well, simultaneously. In The Tramp, however, you get them all. Every surface onstage is a screen. There is an understanding of old reel-to-reel film technology with its count-downs and its specks of dust. And there is a segueing of a performance with green screen technology and old footage that is so impeccable, you will gasp. In this show, the only ego at work here is that of the production itself.

But then, there is Anderson himself. At this theatre, audiences have been privileged to see him in four very different productions so far.This young performer chameleonically embraces the role with a depth of focus and a whirligig presence that is about sincerity as it is about jubilance. Somewhere between a young Joel Grey and a young Danny Kaye, Anderson finds his own feet and his own interpretations of old chestnuts that give them the kind of life they probably had when they were brand new tunes. His stage presence is a total tonic, and his joy in performing is infectious. In short, this is an extraordinary show about the value of play and the play of value. See it. It will touch you forever.

The Tramp is written and directed by Amanda Bothma. Performed by Daniel Anderson accompanied on piano by Paul Ferreira, it features design by Wilhelm Disbergen (set and lighting), Sonwa Sakuba and Amanda Bothma (choreography), Bryan Schimmel and Dale Ray (musical arrangements), Andrew Timm and Adino Trapani (audio-visual) and Lulutho Mhlaba (technical assistance). It is co-produced by Wêla Kapela Productions and Daphne Kuhn and stage managed by Regina Dube assisted by Melidah Thakadu, with technical management by Loftus Mohale assisted by Reggie Mathebe. It is onstage at Theatre on the Square in Sandton until 27 July 2025.