Writer-director: Nadia Davids
Performer: Quanita Adams
Venue: Baxter Studio, until April 10
When the audience erupted into yet another standing ovation at the end of the performance I attended, I was more than convinced that Nadia Davids and Quanita Adams deserved their acclaim at this year's Fleur du Cap awards for At Her Feet.
Davids walked away with the Rosalie van der Gucht Prize for new directors and Adams won in the best actress category.
So much has been said and written about this edifying theatrical experience. After seeing it for the fifth time, my biggest challenge was to find something fresh to say about this one-hander that could perhaps renew the perspectives or enlighten public perception of the piece.
The magnificence of At Her Feet allowed me not just to get pleasure from it again, but it also allowed me to see those transformed angles. This is indeed something that not many plays can boast of.
It is as the writer says in her footnote in the programme: "While the play is located very strongly around demystifying the way in which Muslim women are perceived, it is also about sharing stories, finding commonalities and celebrating the way in which other people's lives can move us to rethink our own."
Davids has taken very personal subject matter and turned it into a jewel of a theatrical production as she explores the roles of women in Islam and, while doing so, exposes bigotry and double standards.
The point is she dared to do it and succeeded in putting on stage a well-scripted one-hander with a great blend of pleasantries and seriousness. This is as theatre should be: it prods and educates while it insightfully entertains.
It is hard to imagine this piece without Adams. She breathes life into the text with an inimitable performance that has its distinctive flavours. The characters are quite varied in age, deportment and perspective.
Once Adams puts on the character's garb she soars to pinnacles few actresses will be able to reach, at least not with the gusto and the nuances she engenders.
The text being balanced is one thing; bringing that text to life in a balanced performance is quite another. The two have worked well as director and actor to achieve this symmetry. Adams has an amazing sense of interpretation of some of the characters, especially the older women, who have idiosyncrasies that are not peculiar only to Muslim women but to older women in general.
She also sings beautifully. Her voice, in a rap section entitled Ms Islam, pierces with power as she delivers one of the most powerful lines of the play, about "routes to freedom that have not yet been built".
And as one ponders lines such as these that are spewed out at rapid rate (much like the rocks that are flung in the content of the play) one realises the immense power of the word. Contrasted with its limitations.
And perhaps I would have to see At Her Feet a sixth time to muse some more.