WHAT DO YOU do when you reach your goal and It’s pouring with rain? The rocks are slippery and the famous heritage site you’d put in your crosshairs five hours ago has disappointing evidence of human carelessness. Why, you introspect. You play act. You imagine your trekking pole as a golf club, a cricket bat, a javelin. You’re alone and on top of the world. You can turn your heart inside out and no one is there to criticise. And this is what he does: Roland Krappe, that is: our protagonist. Beautifully played by Jürgen Hellberg in a jewel of a play, Roland’s Cave is on at Theatre on the Square in Sandton until 13 September 2026.

This play, directed by LM Radio’s Shireen Hollier takes you by surprise. The basic pragmatic premises of the situation are made clear in the first few minutes of the work and you may find yourself thinking quietly ‘and then?’, and even more quietly wondering how this work will reach its denouement with you still awake. But these ponderings forget that you are in the hands of master crafters. And from this moment, the work has your focus unstintingly for its 90 minute duration, moving you to laugh out loud with guffaws of recognition, as it will ease a tear or two down your face, which also has to do with recognition. The deeper kind.

So, ‘our’ Roland, a toilet paper king in the business world and an unfinished musician in his heart is here at the legendary Roland’s Cave, in the Drakensberg. The weather’s uncooperative and his phone’s battery is depleted. With not even a jersey to offer him succour from the storm, he resigns himself to fate, but lets his thoughts travel wide and they take him – and you – on a musical journey of more than four decades with a mound of well marketed toilet paper in between.

It’s a tale of allowing your dreams to be dreams even if they were forced to digress. It’s about allowing your older self to reflect on the terror of being put in the spotlight as a promising child. And it’s about a half a dining room table and a marriage that’s more robust than a kiss from an arbitrary blonde that feels like a bulldog attacking her porridge.

And while the set is fabulously improvised with crumpled up brown paper serving as rocks, it’s the storytelling that matter. In Hellberg’s body and vocal skills, the parameter of a South African musical landscape is painted, from Sipho Mchunu and Johnny Clegg’s maskanda to the Funkytown disco music you may have found in 1970s nightclubs. His boom boxing skills and his understanding of the underbelly of music takes you from Ladysmith Black Mambazo to Schubert’s lieder with complex yet simple gesture that at once open up a relatable and unforgettable world. Not, of course to overlook Puccini in his most well-recognised aria, Nessun Dorma.

The work is about vulnerability and potency in the face of an unknown tomorrow and rather than moor itself in schmaltziness, it skips around cliché, touches horror with temerity and gives you something to take home with you that you won’t forget in a hurry.

Roland’s Cave is written and performed by Jürgen Hellberg and directed by Shireen Hollier. It is produced by Daphne Kuhn and Flying Pigs Theatre Company, stage managed by Regina Dube, with technical management by Loftus Mohale assisted by Reggie Mathebe, technical assistance by Nhlanhla Zungu, production assistance by Za Mwubela and theatre assistance by Magdalene Grace and Patricia Ramotatha. It is onstage at Theatre on the Square in Sandton until 13 September 2026.