WHEN YOU CAN pluck an eye from someone else’s perfect face and make it your own, or reuse the throwaway material that is commonplace for the city’s recyclers in a way that changes them forever, you know that the magic of story needs no bounds, and this is what you will experience in Daniel Buckland’s delicious and flawless work Afropocalypse, currently onstage at the Market Theatre until 7 December 2025.

Divided into four distinct tales which foreground the brokenness of society and the innovation necessary to make puddles of detritus resonate with stars, the work is an utter masterclass in collaboration. The 14-strong ensemble of performers evoke the madcap tales of three fat and very very hungry men, dogs that pour from the skies, a chameleon that holds the mystery of mortality and a one-eyed mother, in a way that will make you want to shout with energy, as though you were nine years old.

These stories evoke the magic of untrammelled narrative in tales that reach back to travelling minstrels of earlier civilisations and street storytellers who set up stages in medieval market squares. There’s flavour of gypsy innovation and Turkish melodrama that might evoke for you the gorgeous insanity of the yarns woven by the ilk of Orhan Pamuk or Salman Rushdie, yarns that play with taboo and impossibility in a way that pulls the seriousness of grown-ups from underneath them.

The set evokes that of Michael Broderick-Taylor’s King of Broken Things, seen in this venue not long ago, but also the ethos of poor theatre, where literally anything you can imagine (or can throw away) can be put to work as set and costumes on a professional stage. And with all of this apparent chaos, the story lines are crystal clear, the choreography is outstanding and the surreal topsy-turvy values articulated from the idea of an African apocalypse are held sacred and splendid. And not a little scary, at times.

The play is a sanctuary for the Great Earth Mother, and the audience must supply the tears or laughter that becomes as currency to the kind of logic that used to fill children’s theatre and literature, before the advent of bland franchises of the ilk of Disney Jr. Stories like those told in Afropocalypse have roots that reach into the storytelling histories and legends of cultures so old, they no longer exist intact – such as Yiddish and San – where anything can happen, lessons are learned but conventional logic is tossed by the wayside.

This work should be performed everywhere and anywhere. Here is an ensemble of fourteen young people that is bursting with skill and talent, with humour and tragedy wrapped in a sequence of impossible realities that reach home with sharp shards that will make you remember what it was like to know boundlessness when you were a child. However you choose to end this year, fill an hour of that time with Afropocalypse. It’s simply mandatory.

• Afropocalypse: Four Fables, Endless Resilience is directed by Daniel Buckland. Staged managed by Letago Molapo, it is performed by Wongama Bazi, Te’ Creswell, Nande Galadla, Thato Kgarodi, Noluthando Khumalo, Moloko Joseph Maphuruma, Ntlotliseng Matsabisa, Lwazilwenknosi Mdluli, Naledi Mqoma, Phumlani “KaMncube” Ngobese, Tumelo Phofi, Thato Radebe, Kutlwana Semela and Thabiso Shandu, at the Mannie Manim Theatre, Market Theatre complex in Newtown, Johannesburg, until December 7, 2025.