ONCE UPON A time there was a small African girl called Violet. She had a white skin, a yellow kite and a blue bicycle called Daphne. One day, Violet meets a lady all dressed in pink who gives her to understand what perfection should be. And this, Once Upon a Teacup, a piece by Jessica Haines is Violet’s tale. It’s directed by James Cuningham and onstage at Theatre on the Square until 2 August 2026.

Redolent with whimsy and precious with rhyming couplets, Once Upon a Teacup is a cautionary tale told with shadow puppetry and a simple set with a complicated heart. It’s a yarn that reaches from the feral fluffy boundaries of childhood, into the complexities of growing up in a world where ‘perfect’ is forced as a binary and compliance with the notion of what ‘perfect’ might mean can point to self-mutilation. Haines is competent as the raconteur, who changes identity and gives French toast a personality, but the stage begs for another presence.

And while the use of ‘slow’ technology like hand-held torches and shadows manipulated to create a universe of joy and terror with the flick of a wrist or the nuance of a light is wonderful, a live musician onstage would have rendered the work less stark and lonely, and less uncomfortable, as a staged narrative. The play evokes another work directed by James Cuningham in 2013, called Sunday Morning, but the reach of Haines’s presence on this stage and the use of poetry and whimsy doesn’t enable the story to stand well as a one-hander.

The work debuted in Sri Lanka and has gone through various iterations and performances at festivals, but you cannot help feeling that it still needs something more. It’s not completely clear what kind of audience it is pitched to. The language games are compelling, the representation of the wonder of small children is endearing but then, there is the reflection of mental illness that is both on point and extremely disturbing.

This is not theatre for children. And yet once you have listened to those rhyming couplets and the meter and rhythm of the work, you lean in to your own expectations of how each line will end, and the tensions of the work are sated in a way that feels comforting to the point of soporific. Jessica Haines is not the 19th century nonsense poet Edward Lear, who made unforgettable poems hilarious in their ill-manneredness. The play evokes the drawings of Quentin Crisp, in how it teeters almost wickedly on the edge of taboo, but it doesn’t push your own limits of what a story about growing up with the looming consciousness that you’re not perfect according to one definition, should do.

As a tale of the malice and cruelty of human society, it ends in a way which is too easy and comfortable. Once upon a teacup raises demons horrifying and monstrous and puts them back to bed again in white pajamas against a sky cast deep black in the absence of light.

Once upon a teacup is written and performed by Jessica Haines and directed by James Cuningham. It is produced by Daphne Kuhn and Alokaya Oli Productions, stage managed by Regina Dube Shubane, with technical management by Loftus Mohale assisted by Reggie Mathebe, technical assistance by Nhlanhla Zungu, production assistance by Za Mwubela and theatre assistance by Magdalene Grace and Patricia Ramotatha. It is onstage at Theatre on the Square in Sandton until 2 August 2026.