Thembela Madliki is the final recipient of the TAAC bursary for emerging directors and Where She Walked is the final production of this extraordinary and visionary project that has produced some of Cape Town’s premier directors. I am going to miss it so much.

I saw Where She Walked at a preview performance because I couldn’t make the official opening and I loved it. I loved it unreservedly, emotionally and deeply. I loved it because it has similar preoccupations and themes with my work at the moment, and I loved it because I was surprised and satisfied with how the play was executed.

Where She Walked is a three hander that deals with family, land, connection, the conflict of the modern world versus the old ways and the challenges of maintaining something while the bulldozers of progress approach. These huge and very current themes are played out through a small and complicated father-daughter relationship, but it is the past, their memories and even ancestry that intrudes.

Performed in the round, and with an interesting combination of naturalism and stylisation, Thembela is busy creating her own style and vocabulary. The result is that the production is fresh and beautiful and layered. There are layers of meaning, time and emotion, all woven together and flowing like dreams into reality and back again.

It is also complemented with an effective set and soundtrack which deliver on the mood and location.

The three performers are wonderful, with lovely attention to detail, great characterisation and focus, and each one with an electric presence that held me from beginning to end, even though my isiXhosa is not good enough to have understood all the words. It didn’t matter. I particularly loved the easy switch of the father’s character from youthful to aged, and the subtle but clever differences in past and present. Movement, repetition and singing also build, hold and take flight, even into the supernatural.

Where She Walked is on until Saturday and it is a fantastic window into the talent that is around in theatre in Cape Town. Go and check it out. I urge you.

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