An ordinary suburban apartment, the conventional accoutrements of domesticity and prosaic background music lull you into a false sense of comfort when you enter the theatre.

This deceptive domestic bliss is quickly shattered and revealed as a site of abuse, defilement and slow-burning rage. Not long after the house lights dim, it is clear why a play written in Italian in 1977 is being staged at a South African festival in 2026. In a week when the president felt shocked enough to comment on the national epidemic of violence against women and the international media is saturated with the lacklustre response to rape at Cornell University, A Woman Alone is sadly a timely reminder of what remains unchanged. Since the original staging in the 1970s, lingerie is more likely to be ordered from Shein, not Littlewoods; the rotary phone has been replaced by the ubiquitous mobile one, and stalking can be both online and in person, but the much-hailed emancipation of women hasn’t borne quite as much fruit as promised.

We encounter Sharon, wound tightly in layers of clothing, unable to see, her breathing laboured and her movement stifled – the subtext of the script presented in one indelible image. She divests herself of the layers of clothing (mostly male, with the exception of a cream satin slip) to the sound of Whitney Houston’s “Saving All My Love for You”. She slowly unwinds each item – a flirtatious sequence with a pair of trousers, gagging at the stench of a jacket – each piece discarded until she is exposed, dressed in a lacy negligee set and a comfortable dressing gown. As the play unfolds, she unravels layers of misogyny and abuse, casual and cruel, with a similar, deliberate intensity. The jarring sound of Skunk Anansie’s “Yes It’s Fucking Political” provides another marker, albeit unnecessary, that this is indeed political.