In 1964, a Zambian schoolteacher gathered a group of misfits and trained them to beat America to the moon. This autumn, their story takes to the stage at the Royal Court with Ryan Calais Cameron and Monique Touko, two of Britain’s most compelling names in theatre sharing the director’s chair.
The Afronauts is one of the most extraordinary true stories never before told on a British stage. It’s Zambia in 1964: the country has just won independence, the Cold War space race is at fever pitch, and a schoolteacher named Edward Mukuka Nkoloso has gathered a ragtag group of young dreamers in a field outside Lusaka to train them to become astronauts.
Nkosolo’s methods are unconventional: involving rolling his recruits down hills in oil drums to simulate weightlessness and swinging them from trees to replicate zero gravity. But his unwavering ambition that Zambia will reach the moon before the Americans or the Soviets, and in doing so announce to the world that an independent African nation can dream as large as any superpower on earth, is absolute.
This autumn, that story arrives at the Royal Court Theatre in its world premiere production. The Afronauts, which is written by Ryan Calais Cameron (For Black Boys who have Considered Suicide when the Hue Gets too Heavy) and directed by Cameron alongside Monique Touko (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding), runs in the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs from 14 November to 19 December 2026.
It closes the Royal Court’s 70th anniversary season, a deliberate and pointed choice that places a story about defiant visionary dreaming at the end of a year of institutional celebration.
Ryan Calais Cameron and Monique Touko: two directors, one bold play
The co-direction model at the heart of this production is as interesting as the story itself.
Cameron and Touko are bringing two genuinely distinct creative perspectives to bear on a single world premiere text, shaping it together from the ground up. It is a collaborative approach that remains relatively rare in British theatre, where the director’s role is typically singular and sovereign, and it raises compelling questions about what two sets of eyes, instincts and experiences can find in a play that one alone might miss.
That Cameron is directing his own writing is unusual enough on its own and the risks doing so are well documented: the writer’s attachment to the text can make it harder to make the bold cuts and reimagining that a production sometimes demands. On the flip side, no one else knows the world of this play more intimately than the person who wrote it, and Cameron’s ability to move between the roles of writer and director on the same material suggests a creative confidence that has been a hallmark of his career.
Touko arrives with a track record that is equally impressive and equally distinct. Her production of Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, a joyful, boisterous comedy that transferred from Broadway to the Lyric Hammersmith to widespread acclaim, demonstrated a director with an exceptional gift for ensemble work, comic timing and the kind of warm, generous theatrical storytelling that fills a room with something close to joy.
A story about dreaming big
The Afronauts is such a promising proposition as a piece of theatre because it’s a story about what it means to dream publicly and defiantly in the face of a world that has already decided what you are capable of. Nkoloso’s intervention was absurd by conventional measures and extraordinary by any other but centred on the idea that Zambia had the same right to reach for the same stars as the big superpowers.
That argument has not lost its force. In a cultural moment when questions of representation, ambition and whose stories get told are more urgent than ever, The Afronauts arrives with both historical weight and immediate relevance – and there’s no better location for it than at the Royal Court.
The Afronauts at the Royal Court
- Theatre: Royal Court Theatre, Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, Sloane Square, London SW1W 8AS
- Dates: 14 November – 19 December 2026
Royal Court Theatre, London
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