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We’ve all been there. You’re in an airport in the middle of the night with four strangers. Your flight’s been delayed, perhaps indefinitely. Outside the windows, a tempest rages that reflects your inner state-of-mind. Tentatively, you reach out to chat to your neighbours. Are you fated to remember this night forever? What strange forces brought you all to this German terminal? What sweet and terrifying secrets will you learn about each other before the night is through?

Conjoining elements of screwball comedy and thrilling, psychological twists, Flughafen is a new theatrical experience from the runaway imagination of Alice Viskat and a quintet of the wildest young acting talents in the Cape. At turns claustrophobic and liberating, whimsical and tense, the play is a locked-room mystery quite unlike anything you’ve set your mind to. Think Knives Out meets The Americans in purgatory. You’ll want to come back to see it more than twice…

News and Reviews for this Show

August 8, 2025  The Wee Review What do you do when you can’t believe the evidence of your senses? That’s the scary premise of Flughafen, a tight and suspenseful four-handed drama which sees a group of strangers stranded in a storm-bound departure lounge. The title just means “airport”, but saying it in a foreign language sets the tone for the play: everything’s familiar yet everything’s a little strange, a wrongness which calls into question the very nature of reality. The joy of Alice Viskat’s script is that, while you sense it’s settling into a narrative trope, you can’t quite tell which trope it’s landing on. Is it a riff on The X Files? A psychological thriller? A modernised No Exit? Three or four times I thought I had the measure of it, and three or four times I was wrong. You do learn the answer by the end of the show, and though there’s one rather odd loose end – a character who briefly appears and is later discussed, but whose significance was entirely lost on me – that’s not enough to spoil a coherent, tightly-woven plot. I can’t say too much without spoiling things myself, but there is an important and topical theme in play: something to do with power and control, with truth and perception. Melissa Pretorius, playing the most likeable of the characters, is the first to notice something amiss, and her creeping uncertainty is subtly expressed – until, quite suddenly, it isn’t. She has a story to tell, emotively and powerfully portrayed, yet itself grown around a troublingly fragile seed. Delivering some comic relief – while adding to the sense of a shifted reality – Jack Paine plays a sarcastic, insouciant airport employee; at times he says hilariously inappropriate things, but they’re all within the range of what we suspect gate clerks secretly think. And the last two characters, played by Sean Black and Lee van der Merwe, are the kind of travellers who’d normally withdraw to the business lounge, accustomed to a world which shapes itself to their needs. We’re primed to dislike them, but they have poignant back-stories of their own… and seem to be capable of surprising acts of sympathy and kindness. Those aren’t the only assumptions you’ll find challenged by Viskat’s complex, mutating storyline. As perceptions of reality swing back and forth, your moral compass may be spinning too: and while this particular narrative is ultimately resolved, the questions it poses have no certain answers. Cleverly-conceived and powerfully delivered, it’s the kind of hidden gem that all of us should fly to. Click Here

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