LET’S FACE IT. Your family is probably as full of oddities and anomalies as mine is. But when Sophie Joans takes pen to paper and uses every part of her extended blood line to tell a story that is wild and truthful, off the wall and ludicrously entertaining, everything else falls into blandness. Joans is another young firebrand on the theatre scene who is taking the theatre industry by its horns and forcing it to take on new shapes and potentials. Her monodrama Île is onstage at Theatre on the Square in Sandton until 6 April 2024.

Armed with her incorrigible curls, her expressive eyeballs and a body that sometimes seems as though it is made of rubber, as well as two wooden boxes that can become the universe at her bidding, Joans tells a 90-minute story of colonialism and dodgy heritage, of mommy issues and a coven of deformed and emotionally maladjusted cats, and of the lava that boils under the surface even after an island has been formed, with such focus and energy, it will raise your spirits, as well as your eyebrows and hackles. She’s not one to skirt around hectic asides involving taboos as fearsome as incest or paedophilia, and how the corollary of growth is rottenness; her tale is not one tapered genteelly.

But it’s a relentless delight all the way – whether she is emulating coconut trees or the idea of doing pranked sexual experiments with a lava lamp, Île is an encapsulating tale of what ifs in a world beset by the complexities of family, culture and the hidden power of women. And like Tasmin Sherman, she of the monodrama My Weight and Why I Carry it, she works in the first person in a way that makes her story, yours. There’s a personal ‘I’ in terms of the specific narrative events that teases apart Mauritian culture, big families and freakish grand-mêres; and a universal ‘I’ that is as much about humanity, emotions and the kind of things we do to keep sane in polite society, or do whatever it takes to appear to keep sane.

Constantly keeping you on your toes with the twists and flick-flaks in her coming of age story which is peppered with French idiom, magic realism and dusted with humour that is at once poisonous and adorable, Joans, with her baby face and grown up horror stories, is a mesmerising performer. She takes a whole empty stage and a full auditorium under her spell. But it’s not all hard-edged, skanky and shocking. There are moments of such whimsy and wonder, you will want to weep. The season is brief: you must make a plan to see it this week. This young woman is a giant in the making.

• Île is directed by Rob van Vuuren and written by Sophie Joans. Produced by Daphne Kuhn and Spark in the Dark, it features creative input by Ryan Stopforth (composer) and Richard White (dramaturg) and is performed by Sophie Joans, with stage management by Regina Dube assisted by Melidah Thakadu and technical management by Loftus Mohale assisted by Reggie Mathebe. It’s at Theatre on the Square in Sandton until 6 April 2024.