THE COLONEL BIRD at The Little Theatre

The UCT Drama Department opens the 2013 student season with renowned Cape Town Director Christopher Weare directing two internationally acclaimed plays by Bulgarian playwright Hristo Boytchev.

THE COLONEL BIRD and THE TITANIC ORCHESTRA, staged back to back in The Little Theatre and Arena Theatres, are intriguing stories resonating both local and universal themes.

THE COLONEL BIRD is a politicized ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST subverting all our conventional definitions of madness. The war in Kosovo in the 1990s gave Bulgarian write Hristo Boytchev's comic satire on Balkan politics a timely edge. Set in the Balkans, a doctor who is probably not a doctor, arrives at a derelict monastery where six mental patients have been abandoned. THE COLONEL BIRD is a telling comedy about these six inmates who declare that their forgotten 'convent' is an independent territory, and they appoint themselves as a 'UN fighting force'. Their pitiful illusion sustains them all the way to the UN building in Strasbourg. The harmlessly insane clients include an impotent gypsy, a mute Russian, a deaf actress and an ex whore who wants to be like Mother Teresa. Boytchev’s view of all forms of authority seems to be, "same asylum, different lunatics." Boytchev has a similarly cynical attitude to the effectiveness of peace- keepers.

The winner of the British Council's International Playwriting Award 1997, this comedy makes a timely debut in South Africa. Where does sanity reside? In the asylum or the outer world?