WHAT DO YOU do when your husband of several decades finds a ‘Rosa’ who has bigger breasts and less years on the planet than you? Why, you retire to the confines of your couch, of course, and eat ice cream from the box with a large spoon, as you drown, momentarily in self-pity. Geraldine Aron’s beautifully witty play is given fresh zest in the hands of director Alan Committie and performer Kate Normington. It’s on stage at Theatre on the Bay until 16 November 2024.

And it is here where you get to meet Angela. Suddenly, she finds herself alone with just the family collection of Chagall prints and Axel the dog to nurse her through the most complicated social challenge she’s faced so far. She doesn’t want to be alone again. She’s not sure how dating works any longer, and she’s not familiar with anybody’s intimate body parts aside from her husband’s. In the feisty style of writing that evokes the work of Nora Ephron – she of the 1989 classic When Harry met Sally fame – which effectively put contemporary cheeky sexy dialogue into film litany, it’s a laugh-a-minute production, both dry and droll that will leave you feeling buoyant. And hopeful that there is, indeed, life after marriage.

It’s a tale where characters have names that border on the madness of nominative determinism, a la Dickens, and which features everything from the secret medical horrors that eating too much beetroot brings, to the mortifying business of buying a dildo for the first time. Normington sparkles with credibility and her own wonderful sense of the ridiculous, but the best nuances of the whole work are the ways in which she brings the dog itself – played by a toy – to life. It takes a special understanding of direction and a special ability in performance empathy to give viability to a prop, on stage. And while you may be a tad perplexed about the Chagall images that rotate on screen on a loop, and represent something of a conceptual red herring in the piece, you will love Axel from beginning to end.

From a discursive perspective, the work doesn’t shatter world views or cast a fiery finger in the eye of society’s expectations of women, but it ups the hilarity stakes and you’ll be rolling in the aisles with your laughter of recognition and that of the ridiculous, which is amped up all the way.

• My Brilliant Divorce is written by Geraldine Aron and directed by Alan Committie. It is performed by Kate Normington until 16 November 2024 at Theatre on the Bay in Cape Town.