THE CHANCE

Aldo Brincat, opens his new play, The Chance, on the one-year anniversary of one of the most controversial race-related and politically charged events to play out in recent South African history: On the 12th of May 2025, the first batch of white South African ‘refugees’ arrived in Dulles Airport, Washington DC. Their refugee claim - fuelled by South African rightwing lobby groups - was facilitated and fast-tracked by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration. 

The Chance is a solo performance starring the phenomenal Henu Baden. (Theatre audiences will remember Baden from productions such as The Cardinal, At Horizon’s End, and his breakthrough solo performance, Every Brilliant Thing).  

In The Chance, Baden plays both Francois and Leticia - a fictitious white South African couple who were among the first batch of refugees to arrive in Washington on 12 May 2025. We meet this couple some time in the future - 700 days since they landed, to be precise - a day on which, a devastating emotional truth is about to drop. 

Henu Baden says that The Chance is about life choices, “sometimes people do stupid things because they seem like a good idea at the time. At every turn, our lead couple are having to grapple with moral, ethical and practical choices - no different to you and me”, says Henu, “and sometimes that works out, but in The Chance, the stakes are much, much higher”. 

Aldo adds, “Making sound life choices is rhetorical and hard enough without the added pressure of uprooting your entire life’s journey to a foreign land, under immense political scrutiny and controversy. And while migration is how the world was made, we humans also seem to have this dual need to remain home; where we are known, loved and understood. The Chance examines these matters of identity, heritage, and belonging in an increasingly weaponised context.”

The Chance is written and directed by Aldo Brincat, who was also the playwright, and actor behind the multi-award winning The Moon Look Delicious From Here, which won the Special Jury Award at the Bitesize Theatre Festival in London (2025), and the Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award at the National Arts Festival (2025). 

The Chance will stage its premiere at Toneelhuis in Cape Town at 7pm, on 12 and 13 May, 2026, before the script is translated into Afrikaans (Die Kans), and begins its national tour in August 2026.