SOMETIMES A STORY shakes you so deeply and moves you with such soul-splitting resonance that even the mention of its name, years after you first became aware of it, brings out the same kind of raw goosebumpiness in your skin and heart. This review is premised on a performance of Isidlamlilo at the Market Theatre in 2023. The work is currently onstage at the Baxter Flipside in Cape Town, until 19 April 2025.

It is here where we meet Zenzile Maseko (Mpume Mthombeni). On so many levels, she is everywoman in South Africa. She’s in a tiny woman’s hostel room in KwaZulu-Natal. It’s fitted with all the humble basics – from an electric kettle to a tin bucket, a wheelchair and a wireless, and all the bits and bobs of being in this world: framed photographs of absent loved ones, a much-thumbed bible, a washing line over the bed.

It is a long play, but such is the storytelling acumen and the passionate focus of Mthombeni, that you completely lose yourself in its interstices. You forget how you are sitting, whether you are physically comfortable or not, indeed, you forget that you are watching a performance of a story at all. You are a molecule in her unfolding tale which is at once horrifying and messy, yet beautiful and mythical. It’s a tale of the innocence and hurtfulness of childhood, of fierceness and murder in a political world, of belief systems that can define you and break you. It is also one about surviving by holding yourself together in the face of brutal injustice and terror.

Set during the birth traumas that South Africa went through in its transition to democracy, Isidlamlilo came to life – like works of the ilk of Sibikwa’s play Chapter 2 Section 9 – through the real testimony of many women in South Africa. Written in English with idiomatic isiZulu expressions, the text flows with lucidity and visceral wisdom – and not without humour – that takes you through the internecine warfare between Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC in the 1990s, into the realm of commissioned assassins and it double-flips back through bizarre incompetencies of the Home Affairs Department. So many things which can render a woman dead when she’s anything but.

Bracketed on either side by the mythical lightning bird, Impundulu and featuring the presence of Nkulunkulu – God himself – the work takes on all the cliched realities of being in a violent world, such as loss, love, forgiveness and resilience. And yet, in its writing and performance, it is so shatteringly fresh, it feels as though you are being introduced to these ideas for the very first time. It’s a work about how our inner engines tick over, in the face of the vagaries of weather, illness and scary political things that can strike you in the night. It is South African storytelling at its very best.

Isidlamlilo: The Fire Eater is directed by Neil Coppen and produced by Empatheatre. Written by Neil Coppen and Mpume Mthombeni, based on a text by it is performed by Mpume Mthombeni and features creative input by Tina le Roux (Lighting), Tristan Horton (Sound), Greg King (Set) and Steven Woodroffe (Special Effects). The set is dressed by Neil Coppen, Wendy Henstock and Dylan McGarry and the production features strobe lights and comes with an age limit of 14. It performs at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town until 19 April 2025.