Stephen Stead’s staging of Wit is probably the best play I have ever seen. The only other which vies for the title is Untitled, last year’s festival stunner put on by Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner Jaco Bouwer. But that was a very different kind of play.

Wit is a Pulitzer-prize winning script written by Margaret Edson, staged with superb lighting, a perfect set and the brilliant talent of Claire Mortimer as the lead character Vivian Bearing, PhD who is supported by a more-than-able cast. The ingredients are there for an incredibly good play, and it doesn’t disappoint. In fact it adds up to more than the sum of these parts and left me within a feather touch of becoming a wrecked puddle of mucous weeping on the floor. Only the very last shards of my dignity prevented it.

But even as I say that I must qualify: this is not a tear-jerker. Much of the scintillating dialogue is comic – of the intellectual sort – and the emotion hits home because it is so understated, so undramatic, so true. Mortimer will make you laugh – in a self-conscious, ironic way most likely – she’ll make you smile, she’ll make you like her despite her obvious iron-hard uncompromising nature, and then she’ll take your heart and wring out all those sobs that ever caught in your throat.

The last showing of Wit is on at 7 tonight at the Rhodes Box Theatre. Don’t miss it.

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