THE journalist turned playwright Susan Hayden makes a successful leap to theatre with this intimate exploration of marital breakdown and reinvention, writes Herman Lategan.
At Cape Town’s Galloway Theatre, tucked inside the Waterfront Theatre School’s restored Mission to Seamen building, Lynita Crofford serves up something unexpectedly potent: a study of middle-class disintegration that never tips into mawkishness or farce.
Stirred Not Shaken follows Kathryn, whose meticulously ordered existence, think alphabetised spices and coordinated cookbooks, implodes when her husband departs for another woman.
But this is no suburban cliché. Crofford’s Kathryn is cosmopolitan, intellectually curious, a woman who knows her Proust as well as her béchamel, her Camus as well as her coq au vin. That sophistication makes her unravelling all the more compelling.
What distinguishes this production is its refusal of easy emotion. Crofford finds the grief in an obsessively diced onion, the rage in a perfectly executed martini.
These domestic rituals become something darker, performances of repression, small acts of sublimation that would intrigue Freud. There’s an echo here of DW Winnicott, the British psychoanalyst who argued that the psyche exists not inside us but between us.
We don’t experience life in isolation; we create meaning together. Theatre becomes what Winnicott called “transitional space”, a place where identity shifts, possibilities open up, and performer and audience construct experience together.
Susan Hayden’s debut script demonstrates the discipline of her journalistic background: no wasted words, no cheap laughs. The transition from journalism to creative writing is notoriously difficult; most who attempt it produce either overwritten prose or undernourished drama.
Hayden succeeds because she trusts the audience to find meaning in silence and gesture, understanding that domestic catastrophe rarely announces itself with fireworks.
Natasha Sutherland’s direction strips everything to essentials: a table, a cookbook, precisely timed musical cues that transform ordinary moments into quiet acts of defiance. The minimalism focuses attention where it belongs, on Crofford’s combustible energy as she navigates the space between breakdown and breakthrough.
By the end, you’ve become complicit in Kathryn’s transformation. The intimacy of the venue, the theatre seats perhaps 60, means there’s nowhere to hide from the emotional honesty unfolding onstage. It’s uncomfortable in the best way.
Stirred Not Shaken continues at the Galloway Theatre until 15 November, with a performance at the Koelkamers in Paternoster on Saturday 22 November at 5pm.
PS: If you want a meal before you go, do pop into the Curry Club at their new premises in the Cape Quarter. I really didn’t think the new venue would work, but it has all the magic of the previous place. The food was good as usual. Book ahead, as they were filling up fast.
Book at Quicket.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jeremeo Le Cordeur
