Ladies of Lavare: Growing Older with Grace and Mischief
Somewhere in a retirement village, a birthday cake is burning in the oven, and the two women who ought to be rescuing it are sitting in a bath. That is the image that sets Ladies of Lavare in motion, and it is a gloriously silly one. It also turned out to be the doorway into some of the most honest writing about growing older that I have encountered on a Johannesburg stage.
I will say it plainly: this was probably the funniest show I have seen this year. I laughed often and loudly, as did the people around me, but I also left with the quiet, slightly full feeling that good comedy sometimes leaves behind when it has been paying close attention to something true.
The story is easy to describe. When Maureen's birthday plans go disastrously wrong, she and her older sister Vera find themselves stuck together in a bathtub. The tub then becomes a kind of time machine, carrying them through memories of their past, the present as it stands, and futures they can only imagine. Along the way they discover how much they need each other and how little time they may have left. Tammany Barton uses the whimsy of that premise to make room for harder conversations, and she never uses it to dodge them.
A gentler way to look at ageing
Most of us are a little afraid of getting old. We rarely say so, but the fear is there: of losing our independence, of slowly losing pieces of ourselves, of having to look squarely at the fact that our time is finite. Ladies of Lavare takes that fear seriously without allowing it to take over the room. There are real moments of melancholy here, and moments of acceptance that arrive softly instead of being announced. They sit beside excitement, adrenaline and bursts of unexpected joy, along with glimpses of who these two women were long before they ended up in that bath.
That balance is the play's greatest strength. Age is treated as another chapter in a full life, with its own adventures and its own surprises, and the sisters are allowed to be funny, stubborn, frightened and brave, sometimes within the same minute. Neither of them is reduced to a sweet old lady or a punchline. Maureen and Vera feel like people with histories, grudges, affections and unfinished business, which is exactly what sisters tend to have.
The magical device earns its place, too. Because the tub can carry the sisters anywhere, the play is free to leap between the comfort of the present and the memories that still shape them, and those leaps are where much of the excitement lives. I will not spoil where the journey goes, but the sense of adventure is real, and it gave the evening a lift I did not expect from a play set, at heart, in a bathroom.
The writing is a joy in its own right. It is heartfelt and witty in equal measure, and it hands the actors a great deal to work with. The humour grows out of character, and the emotional turns feel earned. It makes sense that the script has travelled so far before reaching us. It won the Fugitive Sisters Cannes Festival Award in 2024 and the Playwright Laboratory London Script Development Programme in 2023, and it was developed at The Core at Corby Cube in England. That is a serious pedigree for a South African premiere, and having seen the play, I think it is deserved. Credit is due to Barton for bringing it home as both writer and producer, and to Theatre on the Square for giving it a Johannesburg stage.
Two performers and a remarkable chemistry
A script like this lives or dies on its two leads, and Shaeleen Tobin and Camilla Waldman are superb. Tobin has built her name in comedy, and Waldman brings years of experience across stage and screen, but what struck me most was how completely they work as a pair. Within minutes the chemistry is so strong that you stop watching two actors and simply believe in two sisters. They tease, bicker and comfort one another with the ease of people who have known each other their whole lives, and by the end we had fallen in love with them both.
Both performers move comfortably between the comedy and the heartbreak, which is no small thing in a piece that asks them to do both, often in quick succession. A joke can land and, a moment later, the room is quiet in a very different way. That kind of control depends on trust between the performers, and between the performers and the writing, and Juliette Jenner's direction makes the most of every one of the 75 minutes.
Stories about growing older are still too rare, and women of a certain age are too often handed the supporting roles. Here, two of them carry the whole evening, and they do it with warmth, mischief and a great deal of skill. In a country where families are so often stretched across cities and generations, a play that gently asks us to pay attention to our elders feels quietly necessary.
Ladies of Lavare celebrates the friendships we treasure and the families that challenge us, and it reminds us that every year adds another thread to the tapestry of who we become. Take a sister, a parent, a friend, or anyone you love who has been around a little longer than you. You will laugh a great deal, you may well cry a little, and you will be reminded that there is joy, adventure and plenty of life still waiting in the later chapters. I could not recommend it more highly.
Ladies of Lavare runs at Theatre on the Square until the 17th of October 2026.