Twenty-five years on, Richard Griffin’s dinner-theatre spectacle is back, and Royal Countess Zingara is bigger and more defiant than ever.
An evening’s entertainment interlinking theatre, performance art and dinner started with a question: what do you say to the world right now? With geopolitical upheaval, environmental anxiety and a social media landscape designed to inflame, what is the role of a party in a tent?
The answer the team arrived at was to say it without words. The show opens with dark imagery before shifting toward celebration and the idea that difference is something to be welcomed, not feared. The symbolic figure of a weeping woman — before pivoting towards joy and a celebration of human difference. The golden thread, as Griffin — the creative force behind the show — calls it, is a simple one: we are stronger together. “It’s a love letter to the world,” he says.
Madame Zingara’s return resulted in a sellout season in Cape Town, now extended to May 17, with a Johannesburg run at Melrose Arch to follow.
The original Madame Zingara grew from a restaurant on Loop Street in Cape Town in the late 1990s — a bohemian, art-filled institution where Griffin first encountered performance art. Then, in 2001, the restaurant burned down. Standing in the ashes, Griffin made a decision: get a tent.
The tent in question was a Spiegel tent — a 19th century Belgian design made from wood, glass, mirrors and velvet, assembled without bolts. Griffin had first seen one at a cultural festival in Ireland and become fixated on it. He tracked down suppliers in Belgium and bought his first one.
The Spiegel tent has one quality that matters enormously for what Zingara does: it’s a tent where acrobats can be rigged and suspended without external support structures. For a show built on aerial spectacle, that was critical. The tent, he puts it, is “a giant Meccano set for boys”.
Griffin had fallen in love with restaurants and kitchens as a teenager. By 13 he was working part-time in restaurants and by 16 he had left school to cook full-time.
The first production, Griffin admits, was “a very, very bad high school musical”. But the team refined the concept over time and built a reputation strong enough that operators from Germany now visit Cape Town to study what Zingara is doing.
His view is that, when it comes to this kind of spectacle, the rest of the world is stiff and very upmarket. “Very expensive. Normally €200-€300 at the door, and for a lot less creativity”.
But after 15 years running the company, Griffin resigned. He had two young, adopted children, the show had consumed him and he wanted to spend more time with them. He stepped back, splitting his time between Cape Town and Johannesburg, and spent a decade focused on being a parent. The return was sparked by a former colleague who had run Zingara’s retail arm. The two were working on a separate project in Johannesburg when she told him plainly: “Richard, it’s time.”
With his children now older and a reformed creative team — including circus director Craig Leo, who played an important creative role in the stage production of War Horse, famous for its life-size horse puppets, they rebuilt the operation. Now, Griffin speaks with obvious pride of the people the company has helped develop over the years. As a majority female-owned company, he speaks of the particularly empathic leadership style that has blossomed as a result.
The acts, and the performers themselves, are quite extraordinary. They’re theatrical, decadent and escapist, each is worth delving into. There are Princess Lunga’s contortions. Ukranian twins deliver high-level acrobatics. Gravity seems to have been paused in a feather-on-palm balance act. Axel Perez is a sixth-generation circus performer who balances on a precarious stack of rolling cylinders.
It’s stressful just to watch because, like so many of the acts, it’s a feat of human endeavour — there are gasps and hands over eyes but mostly you can’t look away. Aerial strength duo Jonny Grundy and Manuel Artino joined recently as part of a deliberate rotation strategy that keeps the show fresh and some people return to see the show several times a season. Then there are The Clorettes, a fabulous quartet of singers. All of this takes place in a tent of sumptuous velvet drapes, setting the scene for a real spectacle.
The performances flow seamlessly into each other. The energy is high volume and vibrant as hosts and waiters move between tables in a playful choreography.
Before and after the show, guests can meander through the indoor and outdoor bar areas, a kind of pre-show space for cocktails and chatter. In one area there is face painting while another offers tarot card readings. At dinner, each course arrives with grand precision between acts and the signature dish is the delicious chocolate chilli steak.
While seemingly effortless, running an experience like Madame Zingara means running an organisation: 162 people on the team with 37 on the food side alone who are responsible for feeding staff and the nearly 400 seated guests each night. Many costs arrive in euros. And the show needs about 80% capacity to break even. About 20% of the nightly audience are now international visitors while the rest are local and Griffin notes how it’s noticeably more diverse than Zingara’s crowds over a decade ago.
For the upcoming Johannesburg run, opening in June at Melrose, Griffin embraces the synergy, noting that the city “loves a good time”. A larger tent is coming for that leg, with more stage space for aerial acts that the Cape Town set-up couldn’t accommodate.
When asked about international expansion, franchising, or streaming the show, Griffin is straightforward: no. “We are South African. Our communications are in South Africa [and] we are fiercely proud of South Africa, in everything we do.”
As the night progresses, some people get up and dance. Between the circus acts and the burlesque and cabaret performances Madame Zingara offers, Griffin argues that it’s an experience only possible here: the specific alchemy of this country’s cultural diversity, held inside a velvet tent, and transformed nightly into something resembling hope.
Madame Zingara: Royal Countess is currently on show at Melrose Arch, Johannesburg until December 31, 2026.
