Review: Mrs Mitchell Comes to Town is a mother of a play with knockout performances

Mrs Mitchell Comes to Town, written and directed by Louis Viljoen is a mother of a play, a mind bending creepy thriller, with bracingly funny dialogue.  Jenny Stead and Aidan Scott deliver superb performances crackling with energy. There is lust and lusting – revenge and murder. Stead plays, Elsa the hot older woman in killer stiletto shoes.  Scott plays Marcus the young swashbuckling hot politician. The heat between them is heightened in a sleazy hotel in a city, kitted out with red velvet. This archetypal space of seedy opulence, is something we would associate with a Film Noir aesthetic – saturated colours, low lighting and the stuff lurking and dangling under the cover of the night. Kieran McGregor’s design frames and contains the two lusty protagonists who at the start tussle and taunt each other in a game. How did they get to be in this room together? ‘What if’ they volley with each other, taunting each other. How is this going to end? Ahh, the suspense is killing us as viewers.

Moving deftly from a hookup in a hotel, room, the narrative splatters and splinters as the true story behind their hookup is revealed. Or is true? Elsa and Marco are not simply archetypes of older woman hooking up with a young squeeze. From the mannered and tightly choreographed opening scene, it all unravels, terrifyingly so. Fear is in the room.  

In tandem, with the narrative playing out on the stage, there is a droll voice-over commentary (voice of Nicholas Pauling), spooling out in chapters. We are told that there is a killer on the prowl, in the city, hiding out in plain sight. We, the audience are watching the coupling of Elsa and Marco, mercurial people, who are adept at shape shifting and manipulating people. They are cheating on their spouses but does that make them killers? Or will they be killed? Who is the real target?  Who is being lured? Lines between perpetrator and victim blur in this story. Watch and see.

I loved the play so much that I saw it twice. I wanted to get a refill of the delicious dialogue and I wanted to try and get a handle on Elsa and Marcus. As they say in the classics, there is no accounting for human behaviour. The slipperiness of the two protagonists makes for mesmerising viewing. I must add that this play is very funny. I felt invigorated by the laughter and the suspense of this intricately made play. I find it interesting that on my first viewing, at media night, the audience was rather subdued. But on my second viewing, the audience shrieked out aloud. Some sounded like they were choking. Same from my side.

Viljoen’s Mrs Mitchell Comes to Town is unsettling and grippingly wonderful entertainment, a visually stylish production, with knockout performances by Stead and Scott. Ahh, the way the smirking Elsa (Stead) slithers, prowls and wraps herself around the golden boy politician, Marcus (Scott), steadfast, unwavering in his gaze – until he is not. There is a lot to mull on in this play about mothering, motherhood; nature versus nurture, the games and ultimate choices that we make. I love the excavation of the construct of motherhood and how that may intersect with the personal becoming a societal thing. Bravo to Louis Viljoen for his full bodied, yummy writing and for his consummate direction in pitting Elsa and Marcus against each other in their night between the sheets. I might go again but the season finishes on May 10.

✳Jenny Stead and Aidan Scott in Mrs Mitchell Comes To Town, written and directed by Louis Viljoen, Baxter Masambe, Cape Town, April 22 to May 10, 2025. Pic: Supplied.