The Huskers

Louis Viljoen’s acid-tongued The Hucksters slithers on to The Baxter stage for a short season from 22 January to 1 February Award-winning playwright and director Louis Viljoen’s critically acclaimed play, The Hucksters, opened in 2019 to rave reviews, audience praise and sold out performances and now transfers to the Baxter Golden Arrow Studio for a limited season from 22 January to 1 February. Viljoen, known for his potent and bitingly sharp works such The Kingmakers, The Pervert Laura and The Demon Bride, directs the award-winning duo Emily Child (The Pervert Laura, The Road to Mecca, Contractions) and Nicholas Pauling (A Steady Rain, Blue/Orange and The Father). This dynamic psychological mystery is an acid-tongued exploration of a casual sexual encounter gone awry and takes a harrowing descent into a world of lies and revenge. A man and a woman meet after not seeing each other for years and what starts off as a romantic, booze fuelled evening, slowly begins to unravel into a psychological mystery as an incident from their shared history rears its head. The mistakes of the past become the horrors of the present as these two broken people dig into their previous lives and the lies that lead them to each other. The Hucksters has been described as Viljoen’s best work yet with Theatre Scene Cape Town calling it a ‘blistering masterpiece” and five stars from John Maytham (Cape Talk) who said, “I had one of those experiences in the theatre that I really treasure … a wonderful experience … A challenging play in the best of ways.” Writer and Literary Critic, Karina M Szczurek, captured it well, saying, “Thought-provoking … fantastic performances. It takes a lot of skill to capture the messiness of human encounters with the pressures of violence, complexity and trauma in play.” Well known-director...

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