Tammany Barton's 'Ladies of Lavare' explores ageing, sisterhood and the questions she wishes she had asked her grannies before they died.
‘Ladies of Lavare’ is a must-see play. Picture: Facebook/Tammany Barton.
Now this is a play that anyone would be remiss to miss. The Ladies of Lavare is on now at the Theatre On The Square and the latest from the exceptionally talented Tammany Barton.
It’s a show about two elderly women who don’t take stock of how much life they have yet to live, but rather, how much life is yet in them. And that’s an underlying premise that’s relevant to any one of us, no matter how old we are.
It’s also about digging a bit deeper than the surface labels we give people, even those super-close to us, like grandparents.
To that end, Barton never really knew her grannies. She knew Granny and Nanny, the roles they played in her life, but not necessarily the women they had been before she came along.
And while she did not have the opportunity to ask them while they were alive, the questions eventually found their way into the production.
“The ladies came to life after I lost both my grannies a few years ago,” she said. “While mourning them, I realised I’d never really got to know them beyond ‘Granny’ and ‘Nanny’. Who were they as women? What did they dream about, worry about, still want or regret?
“Writing this play was my way of exploring those questions.”
How much life is still in you?
The Ladies of Lavarne is the story of sisters Vera and Maureen, two older women who find themselves stuck together in a bathtub in their retirement village after Maureen’s birthday plans go spectacularly wrong.
There is also a birthday cake burning in the oven. The tub then becomes something else metaphorically, carrying the pair through memories, imagination, and possible futures as they confront their relationship, their history, and growing older.
Barton said the relationship between the sisters drives the story. It is littered with the baggage accumulated when two people have known one another almost their entire lives.
“There’s the shared history, the old arguments, the things you never quite say, the memories you each remember completely differently, and the fears and challenges that come with growing older,” she said.
“It’s a story about coming of age at every age.”
Her own relationship with her sister helped shape Vera and Maureen. Barton said she can already imagine the two of them decades from now, still arguing about the same things and laughing at familiar memories.
As a child, Barton said she remembers how she played in the bath, where ordinary objects could become imaginary worlds.
She said that ability seemed to disappear with childhood, but she later recognised something familiar as her grandmothers aged.
“I noticed they became more playful again, almost childlike. It took me straight back to that bathtub,” she said. “So the bathtub became a theatrical place where memory, imagination and reality could collide.”
Magical bathtubs and childhood memories
It’s a play about ageing, true. But Barton said she didn’t want to treat ageing as a slow process of becoming less relevant. Instead, she wants older people to be seen beyond their age and the care they may require.
“We tend to think of ageing as a process of losing things: youth, independence, relevance, possibility. I wanted to explore the opposite,” she said. “What if getting older is another kind of coming of age?”
“I wanted to write something full of life and wonder, with older women as the protagonists: women with desires, regrets, humour, secrets and futures,” Barton said. “Maybe we never stop becoming ourselves.”
The play has already received international recognition. It won the Fugitive Sisters Cannes Festival Award in 2024, participated in the Playwright Laboratory London Script Development Programme in 2023 and was a finalist in the South African Muse Awards in 2025.
Barton said that she hopes its Johannesburg run prompts audiences to do something much simpler than contemplate awards or theatre.
“Phone your granny. Ask your mother about her life before she became your mother. Sit with an elderly neighbour and ask them something you’ve never thought to ask,” she said. “Once they’re gone, we can’t go back and ask the questions we wish we had. I learnt that the hard way.”
Ladies of Lavare runs at Theatre on the Square at Nelson Mandela Square, Sandton, until 17 October. Tickets are available through Webtickets or the theatre box office.
