As countries move toward electrification and decarbonization, copper has become one of the most strategically important metals in the global economy. It’s critical infrastructure, and in Natasha Mumba’s Copperbelt, copper becomes the circuitry of a family and a nation: carrying current, building up charges, and sometimes shorting out —as power flows between the poles of home and business, inheritance and plunder.
Copperbelt—world‑premiering at Soulpepper in a co‑production with the National Arts Centre through March 1, 2026—arrives burnished by years of development (including a Nightswimming Writing Commission) and by Mumba’s own dexterity across acting, directing, and now playwriting. With Nina Lee Aquino directing and a dynamic and largely Zambian ensemble, the production threads an engrossing line between intimate family saga and geopolitical pressure cooker.
The Copperbelt is Zambia’s mineral heart. In the play, it’s also the fault line beneath a wealthy family’s estate and a mining deal with a Canadian company. Eden (Mumba), a junior operations manager in Toronto, returns to her ailing father’s home and steps into a legacy-forging brawl that involves siblings, a formidable patriarch, and her white Canadian boss, Peter (Rick Roberts), whose proposed “partnership” reeks of predation. Think a colour-swapped Succession meets Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and add ore. The stakes are substantial: a family empire with local ownership of Zambian resources … or a slick, sick replay of the colonialist project. This is a fresh and vital story we haven’t before seen on the stage … though parts of its subtext are very familiar.
The core relationships crackle—none more so than that of Eden and Peter, which is sexually charged yet coldly competitive. Mumba’s Eden is flinty, strategic, and wounded, toggling between Toronto steel and the pull of Copperbelt memory and family. Roberts’s Peter is exquisitely slippery—urbane, paternal, and ravenous. Their squirm-inducing tug‑of‑war features unsettling power and racial dynamics, balanced by uncertainty over who’s gaming who.
Eden comes by it honestly, as her family—brought to life in performances that are magnetic, lived‑in, and alive to subtext —is gloriously dysfunctional. As Eden’s brother Dalitso, Kondwani Elliott Zulu blends grievance with brittle bravado, while Makambe K. Simamba’s sister Lombe scorches with her quicksilver intelligence and resentment. Eric Miracle as her husband Musolo supplies welcome flares of conscience that pierce the fog of family war, and matriarch Warona Setshwaelo channels care and conscience into dignified, steely command.
And through it all, the family’s paterfamilias Kasuba (Kapembwa Wanjelani), who holds the mining license (or does he?), prowls the stage with a striking mix of leonine authority and mortal frailty. At one point, he articulates a critical African proverb about “the soup of the family”, It may splash, he intones, but it does not spill — and the play stress‑tests the truth of this credo.
Rachel Forbes’s modular set design is a kinetic marvel: a partial, flow‑through suggestion of Peter’s left‑stage apartment slides, aggregates, and hardens into the fully realized Zambian home that later in the play swallows the stage—embodying a narrative that moves from corporate facades to historical and geographical solidity. Michelle Ramsay’s lighting is vivid and surgical. And Movement Director Tawiah M’Carthy’s brief, startling movement sequences—ritual pulses between the play’s naturalistic, dialogue-intensive scenes—externalize the primal emotional dance taking place beneath the negotiations and all the barbs. Lines of dialogue are spoken in Bemba, grounding the drama in place, even as it shuttles between continents.
The first half of the play shoulders very heavy lifting—industry context, diaspora dynamics, a (necessary) tutorial in how Canadian firms trade on virtuous branding, as well as the complex interpersonal backstory—and as a result, it feels slow in developing. But once all parties land in Zambia, the fireworks begin: with an explosive pre‑intermission detonation, then a second act that really crackles and hums. Throughout, Aquino’s direction is lucid and unsentimental, giving the actors motive‑driven velocity that marries well to that striking, movement-driven visual subtext.
We end with a satisfying—and appropriately ruthless—corporate resolution, which is balanced by an only partially resolved, and yet equally satisfying, familial outcome. In post‑colonial capitalism, maybe that’s as good as it gets. Perhaps this soup doesn’t spill because the bowl is made of very valuable ore.
Copperbelt continues at Soulpepper until March 1, 2026. Tickets are available at soulpepper.ca
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
