FIONA RAMSAY and Graham Hopkins once again join forces in a significant new South African play, Albie Sachs: Fathers, Sons and Soft Vengeance, which comes to the Baxter Studio for a limited season from 13 to 31 October 2026, at 8pm, with Saturday matinees at 3pm.
Written by Gail Louw, directed by Ramsay and starring Hopkins as Albie Sachs, the one-person play honours one of South Africa’s most remarkable figures: activist, survivor, constitutional architect and champion of human rights.
Poetic, intimate and deeply human, the play draws on Sachs’s experiences of the bomb attack he survived, his relationship with trauma, and his bonds as both a son and a father. It traces his lifelong commitment to justice — from marching against apartheid at the age of 17, through exile and the devastating 1988 car-bomb attack in Mozambique, to his vision of “soft vengeance”: the creation of a democratic, just and humane South Africa.
Sachs lost an arm and the sight in one eye in the attack, which was carried out by apartheid-era security forces. His extraordinary journey of recovery and resilience forms part of a narrative that moves between the public and private dimensions of his life.
Told in Albie’s own voice, the play is a poetic slice of biography that explores family, resilience, forgiveness and fatherhood, while asking what “soft vengeance” means in a world still learning how to heal.
The play also looks at Sachs’s relationship with his own father, Solly Sachs, and his experience of becoming a father later in life to his youngest son, Oliver.
“Staging a play on the life of Albie Sachs offers rich emotional and dramatic terrain,” says director Ramsay. “His story is both epic and intimate — spanning resistance, loss, recovery and fatherhood. It captures not only what happened to Sachs and what he did, but also who he is: his moral vision, emotional resilience and unwavering idealism.”
She adds: “Albie is an inspiring figure who overcame great odds and, with this play, the audience will leave not just with knowledge but feeling transformed by the experience.”
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