Review: And the Girls in their Sunday Dresses, intriguing play with superb performances,

What: And the Girls in their Sunday Dresses by Zakes Mda When: February 13 to March 7 , 2026 Where: Baxter Studio, Cape Town Bookings: Webtickets Performers: Awethu Hleli as The Woman and Tamzin Daniels as The Lady Director: Mdu Kweyama Assistant director: Lyle October Design: Leopoldt Senekal Soundscape/ music composition: Jannous Aukema Lighting design: Solomon Mashiane

Oh Sister Woman! And the Girls in their Sunday Dresses by Zakes Mda is an intriguing play with superb performances by award winning Awethu Hleli and Tamzin Daniels.  Direction by Mdu Kweyama heightens the absurd and absurdities in this play, pivoting around women-in-waiting, in a food line, to purchase rice and their unlikely bonding as the layers of their back stories are unpeeled on stage. We the audience gasp but they, the women don’t acknowledge verbally what is revealed as they tell us about their lives. The play is on in the Baxter Studio, February 11 to March 7, 2026.

The women clock the reveals, non-verbally. Mdu’s directorial hand is evidenced with his signature use of physical movement, through body, gesture, timbre of voice. I was intrigued when reading the script, before watching and I am still mulling it over.  This lack of verbal recognition by the women, certainly creates dramatic tension. Why don’t they say– “omg – such a coincidence that we are both standing here …” Would women in a queue keep shtum about what is revealed? Well, they do in this play.

I love the dynamism and rapport between these two sister-women thespians, clutching their handbags and their baggage. They are on stage all the time and totally own the space and story – physically and emotionally. They are also very funny and that is needed in this story of waiting, as a release from its interrogation of burning issues – including food poverty and food politics, the call to activism versus submitting, subjugation of women by men, transactional relationships arising out of poverty and racial inequality, perceptions of beauty, the use of skin whiteners to look “white” and less “Black”.

“Waiting is a deferment of revolution” is at the nub of this story for Mda and I guess that an acknowledgment of the ties that bind the protagonists, would have detracted from the issues. Perhaps it would have made the play about the two women and not about the issues which Mda thrashes out, against the intersection of the women.

The women seem to be totally different at the start of the narrative as they stand in line in Lesotho to buy rice, which is being dispensed by the government and which it appears, was not meant to be sold. It was meant to be distributed by those in need. The Woman (Awethu Hleli) and the Lady (Tamzin Daniels) have some money to buy the rice. They are not poor enough to qualify for free food but are not exactly flush with funds and need subsidised food – hence the food aid line. They have stood for days, waiting, chatting and bonding as women tend to do, while waiting in lines. They share a chair (supplied by The Lady) and snacks (supplied by The Woman). The play was first staged in 1988 and it is being staged in period. No mobile phones are used.

Awethu Hleli and Tamzin Daniels are members of the Baxter’s Fires Burning Company and in this play, they have the opportunity to get their teeth into resilient women, set against a delicious leitmotif of “Sunday Dresses”. Sunday dresses can be worn, any day, at any time, we learn in the play. We put on beautiful dresses, for ourselves, to feel good, to be beautiful for ourselves. I love that and I love the utter relish and joy evoked by Hleli and Daniels, as they croon about the office girls in the vicinity and their Sunday Dresses and play a game of chairs and snacking. They do terrific accents (I won’t plot spoil) in and totally vamp it up in their impressions of the “fallen woman” in their midst and the bureaucrat in the food line who demands that they fill out the forms in triplicate and orders them to count their teeth. They also sing. Lots of riffs off Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, Kafka and other “waiting” plays such as the recent, The Cry of Winnie Mandela,  the theatrical adaptation of Njabulo Ndebele’s 2003 novel of the same name, directed by MoMo Matsunyane, which we saw at the Baxter in January/February 2025.

Gorgeous set and costumes by Leopoldt Senekal, drenched in sepia tones, with Jannous Aukema’s soundscape/music composition, setting up a hum of traffic and other sounds, conjuring up the industrial bleakness of this food line. In conjunction with the austerity and boredom of waiting, there is the sheer joy of dressing in beautiful Sunday Dresses; not only activating for change but acting on that, stepping out of line, literally and figuratively.

I love Zakes Mda’s work and I loved this play and production, even if I have my reservations about how these protagonists might respond as they wait in line. Bravo to Hleli and Daniels for their beautifully textured evocations of The Woman and The Lady in the food aid line. Standing ovation. Do not miss.

✳ Tamzin Daniels as The Lady and Awethu Hleli as The Woman in And the Girls in their Sunday Dresses by Zakes Mda, Baxter Theatre, Cape Town, February 13 to March 7 , 2026. Pic: Oscar O’Ryan. Supplied.