WHEN YOU HEAR complete strangers discussing their culinary habits on their way out of a theatre, you know that something has sunk into their sensibilities, and the play has reached them. You have this morning to re-arrange your plans: there is just one performance left of the delightful Aaron McIlroy in A Vegan Killed My Marriage at Theatre on the Square in Sandton, and it is this afternoon.
And it is here where you will meet James, who loves every stripe of meat, cooked in every way you can dream of, as long as there is lots of it. In the course of his day job however, he gets to stay at the Buddhist retreat in Ixopo in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, where in one day, his priorities shift and the joys of the vegetable ripen in his tastebuds and his heart. And they sour his opinion of even the photographic image of meat on a passing truck, enough to make oat milk curdle.
It’s a slippery slope, involving his wife, his fridge’s internal organisation and the way in which goats have nervous breakdowns, that leads him into a new understanding of life, the universe and everything. Spotted with hilarity and hectic circumstances that will make you laugh with horror and oft with recognition, the yarn ends perhaps a tad too neatly, but end it does, with some strong beliefs in the future of the planet.
A little like a tale of fanaticism of any variety, A Vegan Killed My Marriage is both light and crunchy, delivered with clarity and wit. McIlroy is a performer who enables you to empathise with his character – you get to mourn for the absence of cheese, glorious cheese, as you understand the social disarray of shame and profound sense of self-aggrandised pride at being the (only) mushroom on a conventional South African braai.
Vegan may change your culinary perspectives or it may encourage you to go gorge yourself at the nearest meat-cooking establishment; either way, it’s cooked just right to be the best kind of tasty and crispy foray into potentially deeply contested ground.
- A Vegan Killed my Marriage is written and directed by Craig Freimond and performed by Aaron McIlroy. It is produced by Daphne Kuhn and stage managed by Regina Dube assisted by Melidah Thakadu, with technical management by Loftus Mohale assisted by Reggie Mathebe. It is onstage at Theatre on the Square in Sandton until 14 July 2024, at 15:30.