The play is set in 1951, one year after the Population Registration Act was passed in South Africa. Tramway Road had a special notoriety for all those who lived in Sea Point, a white residential suburb of Cape Town. It also exerts its influence over all the characters in this play: an expatriate English couple, Arthur and Dora Langley; Emil, a young man with dreams of becoming an actor in London; and Jacob, a Cape Coloured house servant who is king of his local Coon Carnival troupe. Tramway Road, and all that it represents, inevitably shatters their hopes, their peace and their ideals.
