PICTURE THE SCENARIO: a girls’ only private high school. Privilege seeps through the crevices of the bones in the old school building, political correctness and moral properness is the veneer that polishes the floor and colours the walls. Set nominally in Makhanda, this is, in essence, every private South African school with a long history, riddled with the need to produce good quality members of society with the right values. But teenagers are slippery things. Qondiswa James’s play A Howl in Makhanda recently enjoyed a brief season in Johannesburg and Tembisa and has other fixtures planned later this year.

Featuring phenomenal performances by Alice Findlay, Oratile Manamela, Nicola Shapiro and Ketsia Velaphi, the work takes on the repetitive nature of a boarding school ethos, punctuated as it is by gossip and politics, lessons which are both rote-based and morally confusing, and the drugs, sex and other illegal experiments conducted in the interstices of the school’s values.

With movement and choreography developed by the cast itself and Linda Wa Ka Shabangu dividing the work into segments, as the man who announces the bells of the day, the work takes us through very specific values confronted by each youngster. Their pasts, contexts and upbringings thus far have not been unspeckled with trauma and catastrophe and this plays a role in how they tell their stories.

However, much of the political diatribe put into their mouths seems to reach beyond the limits of what a schoolgirl can articulate. Yes, a 16-year-old is able to experiment with cigarettes and weed, sex and pain, but can she really leap outside her framework and speak with cynicism about the world and its brokenness? About genocide and how Newtonian theory reaches beyond the science room? The work leans on the side of shouty, but the performers contain it – or the series of ritual involving costume and movement contain it – in the framework of school. The discomfort rests on adult cynicism toward values that are broken that feels anachronous for young people. It feels like the framework of the school and the youth are a vehicle for a political agenda rather than the focus of the work.  

Having said that, the basics bones of this story which forces young performers into even younger headspaces, armed as they are, with bottle green gymslips, shirts and blazers, a table, and little else, has the potential of touching the ideas cast out by Athol Fugard’s 1989 work My Children! My Africa! within a contemporary framework. The piece needs more development in its scripting and less platitudes put into the paths of the teenagers represented. It’s a worthy play but needs both more and less.

• A Howl in Makhanda is written directed by Qondiswa James and produced by POPArts Theatre. It features creative input by Jannous Aukema (sound) and Themba Stewart (lighting). It is performed by Alice Findlay, Oratile Manamela, Nicola Shapiro, Ketsia Velaphi and Linda Wa Ka Shabangu, and performed two brief seasons at the beginning of March 2026, at space.com, in the Joburg Theatre complex, and at TX Theatre, in Tembisa. More seasons are planned later this year.