Theatre artist Omphile Molusi has only arrived from South Africa the night before our interview, and already he’s helped transform a rehearsal space on Hamilton Street into a township’s beaten-up back yard.

On a break from rehearsal, Molusi sits in front of the ragged sheets and hanging laundry and smiles, but admits he’s jet-lagged—a feeling he’s gotten used to as he travels extensively outside his home country. He grew up in a small village in South Africa’s northwest, later moving as a teen to the township of Itsoseng. But it was after he left for trade school and discovered theatre, eventually winning a Royal Shakespeare Company bursary in 2007 to study in Stratford, England, that he was launched on a path that would take him away from home many times. The past few years have seen him perform everywhere from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where he also won an award, to Chicago, where he premiered his new play Cadre, a show that’s coming to the Cultch.

He’s often half the planet away, but Molusi is never far from home in his subject matter or his heart. “I’m very grateful and I always want to go back there and give what I can,” says Molusi, who these days helps run programs to teach village children how to write their own plays. “Where I am now, I wouldn’t be there except for where I came from.”

Cadre is about an uncle he knew mainly as a broken man who was a heavy drinker. But several years ago, his uncle opened up about his story, and his part in the struggle to end apartheid as a soldier in the militant Azanian People’s Liberation Army.

“I had no idea that he had that experience, and then came the realization that there’s a lot of people like that who have contributed a lot to the country but they are unsung heroes,” explains Molusi, who says most of the publicly known stories about the struggle surround the higher-profile African National Congress. “The most important thing was what he said to me: people put in the energy to fight a system and when they achieve that, what they get is not what they expected. They say, ‘A lot of this is not what we fought for.’ ”

Molusi is referring specifically to the fact that, even though apartheid has ended, people are still fighting to get basic services like running water and electricity, not to mention housing, in the townships and villages.

“You should never forget that you went through this hell to achieve this—and you don’t want to go back to that hell,” Molusi says of his message in the play. “You should appreciate that you have fought so hard for what you have.”

The play has, at its heart, a love story between two teens, but it also follows two brothers, one of whom enlists and becomes obsessed with revenge. It follows the moral struggles and violence he faces from the 1960s up to the fall of apartheid in 1994.

In a rehearsal of the opening moments, Molusi becomes Gregory, the character inspired by his uncle, a lost man who says he is “still struggling to make sense of my life”. He then falls into his memories, which play out before the audience. What’s striking right away is the way Cadre, which Molusi wrote as well as stars in, makes magic out of low-tech devices. While he speaks, actors Lillian Tshabalala and Sello Motloung, who play multiple characters in the play, stand behind the hanging sheets, singing hauntingly into simple buckets to amplify their voices, their hands scratching at the pails’ metal surface for added rhythmic effect. Later, shadow puppets show bits of action from the character’s life from behind the sheets.

“The set has the idea of a back yard as well: the idea of people being put in the back—‘You stay there at the back!’ ” says Molusi, surveying the backdrop, and then adding: “In the townships…you have washing lines and people hang their clothes there.”

As much as Molusi enjoys taking the little-known story of rebel forces and the price they paid for democracy in South Africa around the world, Cadre’s few performances at home have been more loaded with cultural baggage. He reports white audiences and black audiences have had different reactions, with some white people saying the play is too militant and dredges up a past that should be laid to rest, while black audiences felt empowered and expressed gratitude for seeing the ideas staged. And of course no audience member was as special as the uncle who saw it for the first time.

“It was a very emotional night,” says Molusi, who reports a veterans’ association is now helping his uncle to get sober. “When he came to see it, everyone applauded him after the show. And he said nobody had ever said thank you to him. That was more important for him than receiving an award. He said, ‘At least I feel like a human being.’ Because he had been struggling by himself.”

Cadre is at the Cultch from Tuesday (February 24) to March 8.