Third World Bunfight

Faust X

2025

Third World Bunfight is an independent Cape Town-based performing arts company, presenting the theatrical creations of Brett Bailey, as well as curating festivals and conceptualizing and running diverse arts events.

Founded in 1996, and managed by Barbara Mathers, our company is dedicated to creating innovative, striking, thought-provoking works, and showcasing artists who shine outside of the mainstream.

We have a long relationship with the Spier Wine Farm, in the winelands near Cape Town, and currently run the performing arts program on the estate.

‘Where is the meaning of our lives? We comfort ourselves with our little triumphs: railways, aeroplanes, rockets, these gadgets of progress that blast us into the future with ever-wilder violence… but does our knowledge really enrich us? Or does it merely pull us away, ever farther away from the mythic world which was once our home by right of birth…’ C.G. Jung

In this second part of Goethe’s magnum opus, we follow the ever-restless Dr Faust, on his rollercoaster adventure through a spectrum of political and mythical realities in his insatiable quest for meaning, truth and power at any cost. Bound to Mephisto by his pact to forfeit his soul if he ever finds inner-peace, Faust meddles in the economics of the global south, plays war games on the peripheries of the EU, and implements grand plans of technological expansion to master nature… with tragic consequences. A surreal drama of human aspiration, temptation, and unchecked ambition, as relevant in today’s fragmenting world as it was when first written. Performed with iconoclastic relish by a troupe of 8 masked South African performers. 

August 2025:  

-Kunstfest Weimar , Germany

October 2025: 

- Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg

- Nanterre, Paris

- Frankfurt/Oder 

Music : Lilongwe by Roberto Musci & Giovanni Venosta

Piera degli Esposti

(Bologna 12/3/1938 – Roma 14/8/2021)

 1999

Music for live recited poems by Massimo Cavallaro & Roberto Musci