Spier Theatre: A Woman Alone
3 October at 12:00 and 19:00; 5 October at 17:30
Adam Small-laboratorium, Stellenbosch
A Woman Alone is not an easy watch, and I did not particularly enjoy it. However, living in a country where women are still being killed, harassed and controlled by men, the 1977 story of a housewife fighting for control over her own life, feels uncomfortably current.
Written by Dario Fo and Franca Rame in 1977, A Woman Alone follows a housewife whose life is controlled by the men around her.
Kim Engelbrecht carries the 65-minute production alone, shifting between the woman’s memories, conversations and increasingly chaotic encounters. The play is performed at the Adam Small-laboratory, as part of Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees.
Its relevance is not simply that it is about an abused woman.
The abuse begins long before the violence. Her husband controls what she does, cheats on her, beats her and eventually locks her inside the house. Other men demand her attention, pursue her sexually and treat her choices as something that they can negotiate. Even when she begins to explore her own sexuality, freedom comes with another man’s expectations attached to it.
It makes the play’s idea of liberation complicated –the housewife is trying to find herself outside the role of a wife and mother, but the world around her keeps reminding her that men believe they have a claim on her. Her struggle is therefore not simply to escape one violent husband; it is to establish that her body, attention and choices belong to her.
That question feels difficult to ignore in South Africa today. Days before the performance, President Cyril Ramaphosa addressed the country after a series of killings of women in Ekurhuleni. He said gender-based violence begins before a woman is attacked or killed, in attitudes that regard women as inferior and men as entitled to control them.
Watching A Woman Alone in Stellenbosch therefore makes the play’s age almost beside the point. The story may have been written nearly five decades ago, but the behaviour it exposes has not disappeared.
The production itself, however, did not always convince me. The one-woman format creates an intimate atmosphere and Engelbrecht handles the relentless movement between characters with commitment. The audience laughed often, particularly as the woman’s increasingly chaotic circumstances became absurd. But the chaos eventually became tiring. I found myself more conscious of the performance’s length than its emotional impact.
Still, A Woman Alone leaves behind an idea worth sitting with: liberation means very little if women are only moving between different forms of male control – in a country still confronting the consequences of that control. Perhaps that is why this play deserves a stage now