A Good House
Bristol Old Vic

AMY JEPTHA’s sharply observed satire on a gated community delves below the aspirational families’ concerns that hunker down there to explore the scars of racism and the state of post-apartheid South Africa. 

In the ghost-like community of Stillwater it takes a mysterious shack appearing on a patch of wasteland to galvanise more than cursory interaction between the residents. Despite never seeing the inhabitants, its presence threatens their security from the physical to the financial, exposing the fears running beneath the surface of the growing class of the newly affluent. 

The innate racism born of history is evident when the only black couple, Sihle and Bonolo, are chosen by the community’s newly created neighbourhood watch to be the sole signatories on an eviction notice for the shack dwellers. The unspoken fear that the invisible inhabitants are black cracks open hidden tensions.