YOUR CHILDHOOD HOME with all its ornaments and perspectives, its garden and plants is a deep vessel of the good and bad, the gentle and rough things that shaped the adult you. And the trace of it is irrevocable and always there, wherever you land up in the world. Stinkhout, an astonishingly beautiful play currently onstage at the Fairtree Atterbury Theatre in Pretoria East, until 17 April 2025, contemplates this idea. It’s a wrenching story with impeccable performances and a tree that will reach deep into your own sense of self.

And it is here where we first meet Gert Groenewald (Frank Opperman). He’s a father of two adult sons, bent by sadness, exhausted in the face of loss. His son Louw (Wilhelm van der Walt) lives overseas. His other son, Schalk has been ‘difficult’ all of his life. His wife, Amanda, has been gone for many years. The yard is bare and broken and big tyres once used as swings for small boys in the huge stinkwood tree are cast aside, perhaps in wait for more small boys to swing on.

There’s a dog just off stage, called ‘Mandrax’. He barks when the conversation turns threatening. But is he, indeed a dog or a metaphor? – it’s a curious resonance with the Ingrid Jonker play also currently onstage.

The family – or what is left of it – come together for a funeral. To sort out emotions and deal with the bits and pieces of memories scattered in the wake of a sudden brutal but oddly anticipated loss. And this death opens up the whole messy chasm of human guilt and pain, as it must. On paper, the work touches all the key points of being alive that could easily slip into cliche, but with the performances of Opperman and van der Walt, it takes you, through that horrifying whirligig of making peace with yourself in spite of the self-recriminations and difficulty that letting go represent.

These two utterly magnificent performers, transform a beautiful text into a complex bruising ode to how hard it is to be one’s own person in the world, given the shards and threads that link us to others. In spite of the flaws that others may impose on us, in spite of how our flaws may bleed into others’ lives. In the hands of Opperman and van der Walt, we are taken flawlessly through three generations of South African men. Hands-on emotion is hard. Embarrassing. Shame-worthy. They’ve been schooled by defining moments of war and loss. Mental illness flows through the family’s blood. Taboo is instinctively understood as taboo and is closed away.

And then, there is the tree. Evocative of the tree in Yael Farber’s Mies Julie of 2012, this wise and dominant construction of rope renders the play like a Greek tragedy. The rope lies in the foreground. It is present everywhere, and addressed as it must be, as the narrative unfolds. Like any human narrative, it takes steps backwards and forwards in time, reiterating ideas and articulating difficult, broken emotions. The narrative gossamer of this piece and how it whirls around sibling relationships, leaving home and losing bits and pieces of oneself resonate with the plot in Wally Lamb’s 1998 novel, I Know This Much is True, about how much siblings should be there for one another, and how the carer can get hurt, but it touches deeper than the specifics of one story over another. If you’ve had an elderly parent, or a sibling. If you’ve experienced loss, anticipated yet sudden, there are wisdoms articulated here that you know.

But never once do you lose a beat in understanding that the yellow t-shirt is a flag for Schalk and Louw as very small boys; the white vest for the next generation; and the puffer jacket, the generation after that. It’s a work which is not all doom and maudlin, however. The gallows humour that is constantly there between the interstices, lends the work a kind of hysterical levity: the kind of thing that makes you laugh raucously amid your tears.

Stinkhout is an unequivocal masterclass in pure acting skill, honed to a point which hits you in the heart and solar plexus simultaneously. Bring tissues.

Stinkhout is an Afrikaans-language play written and directed by Philip Rademeyer and features creative input by Philip Rademeyer (set); and Andi Colombo (lighting and stage management). It has a no under-16 age restriction, is performed by Frank Opperman and Wilhelm van der Walt and is onstage at the Fairtree Atterbury Theatre in Pretoria East until 17 April 2025.

It also performs at the Suidoosterfees at the Artscape Theatre in Cape Town, 30 April – 4 May 2025.