Copperbelt

(Originally published for Stage Door)

On the night of Copperbelt’s premiere, Natasha Mumba and Rick Roberts struggled to deliver the script’s final lines, repeatedly cut off by bursts of applause. The stalls were electric, vibrating with anticipation. As Mumba’s character, Eden, finally reclaimed agency over her own life, the audience was wholly attuned: spectators cheered, laughed at every microgesture, and punctuated the scene with spontaneous blasts of approval. Copperbelt has the rare ability to pull its audience completely into its orbit.

The reason is that this new production from Soulpepper Theatre and the National Arts Centre touches some of the deepest fractures in contemporary public discourse: patriarchy, racism, exploitation, and the uneasy mechanics of plutocracy.

The plot centres on Eden, a Zambian woman who has built a hard-won career in Toronto at a prestigious international mining firm. When news of her father’s heart attack arrives, the life she has carefully constructed is abruptly interrupted. Summoned back to the Copperbelt region of northern Zambia, she rejoins her siblings as their father prepares to step down as CEO of his mining empire and urges his children to assume responsibility within the firm.

Mumba’s script excels at staging contradiction. Her characters possess genuine, three-dimensional depth. The figure of the father (Kapembwa Wanjelani), for instance, is at once domineering, visionary, and protective. Eden, on the other hand, must balance ambition with calculation, loyalty with strategic distance. Here, intimate bonds and financial interests are tightly intertwined, as Eden’s company is first a business partner and later a direct competitor of her father’s firm.

In a script where every personal confrontation ultimately rests on economic tensions, director Nina Lee Aquino proves particularly adept at revealing conflict through tightly constructed ensemble scenes. She inserts carefully choreographed slow-motion sequences in which the actors’ gestures are amplified and stylised. In the dinner table scene closing Act One, polite reunion chatter gives way to a succession of suspended, almost dreamlike tableaux: time thickens and loosens in cycles, creating an atmosphere of estrangement. Curved orange walls glide into place, exposing the floor plan incrementally, as the script assembles the family’s inner architecture with measured precision, scene by scene.

At times, the script’s narrative intricacy slows the dramatic flow, particularly in one-to-one confrontations such as the exchange between the father and Eden’s boyfriend, Peter (Rick Roberts), where complexity and rhythm pull against one another. A degree of tightening might sharpen the pace. Yet this very density remains the production’s strength; it is what gives the story its weight. There are no heroes and villains, nor easy moral resolution. All of the characters operate within the same capitalist system; all are, in the end, members of Zambia’s economic elite. As Dalitso (Kondwani Elliott Zulu), long-time manager of the family company, reminds them, they are “spoiled.”

Mumba’s performance is layered, controlled yet incandescent. She commands the stage with clarity and authority. Diametrically opposed in style is Kondwani Elliott Zulu, a Zambian actor whom the production recruited during its workshop period in Zambia. Zulu offers a more understated, naturalistic presence. His restraint becomes his power; in a key monologue, he reveals how deeply his loyalty to the firm is rooted in care rather than profit, drawing a quiet tear from the audience.

Ultimately, in tracing the fractures of a Zambian dynasty, Copperbelt quietly indicts Canada. The play exposes the strategic detachment underlying Western global partnerships and their capitalist reflex to exploit other countries’ resources in the name of growth and prosperity. What the West often reduces to an abstract ‘Third World’ (a blurred, monolithic ‘Africa’) emerges instead as a site of agency, power and contradiction, unsettling the comfort of our distance.