2024 – Cape Town
A nostalgic trip into a gentler past, Live With Ivy opens in 1950s Nyasaland — now Malawi — before leaping forward to London’s West End in the 1980s. The Garrick family has been in the theatre for 200 years, but times are changing, and young Ivy must choose between law and the stage. Her wily charm draws Uncle Rex back to a world he thought he’d left behind.
Written by Nicolas Ellenbogen and directed by David Scales, who also took on the role of Uncle Rex, the production starred Jean-Marie Shoots as Ivy across a short six-show run in June 2024.
The production was a study in theatrical minimalism. No set — just a backdrop and two chairs, which over the course of the evening became a car, a dead lion, a campfire, and whatever else the story demanded. With nothing but two performers and two chairs to carry the narrative, the lighting and sound design were not supporting elements — they were the production. Every scene change, every shift in time and place, every emotional pivot was told through light and atmosphere.
Hema Maskowitz served as lighting designer and operator, bringing Verlig’s own equipment into the Milnerton Playhouse to build a rig that had to hold two very different worlds — the warm, amber-drenched light of colonial Africa and the cooler, more theatrical tones of the West End stage. Working in close collaboration with the sound design, the two elements together created the full sensory world the production needed to breathe.
