COTTONWOOL KID. Written and performed by Toni Morkel. Directed by Sylvaine Strike. Theatre Arts.
MEGAN CHORITZ reviews
This is the second run of Cottonwool Kid, at the Theatre Arts in Obs, because the first run was totally, completely, absolutely sold out. Like SOLD OUT. Tonight was my one and only chance to see it and even though I am sick, and feeling horrible, I hauled out a mask and off I went.
I was expecting to love the show. I love Toni as a performer, improviser, and theatre maker, and I love Sylvaine as a director so I was confident that it would be a goodie. And there’s the other thing of it having been SOLD OUT.
What I didn’t expect was the big deal. The huge deal that swept me up and got me crying, and I couldn’t really stop, and I had to run away at the end, because I was crying into my mask and my glasses were all fogged up and I had a drip of snot on my top lip. And I left Toni a sobby broken voiced message because the show undid me.
Magical things on stage
Picture this. A kid in South Africa in the sixties. A kid with horrible eczema, asthma, and undiagnosed OCD, with an oblivious, dysfunctional mother and father. As a child, CK tries to deal with her afflictions, and starts to believe that it is her responsibility to keep her horrible mother alive, and if she doesn’t do all the things her mother will die.
Toni and Sylvaine know how to make magical things on stage. They know light and heavy, funny and heart breaking, physical and emotional. They make it beautiful and strange, and it is as if the emotions are pulled out of our chests and wrapped around and smashed like a vase in the wind or picked up and patted between wet cottonwool like beans.
You should go and see it …
CK’s mother was almost my mother. The smoking. The crazy unpredictability, the being sick. CK was almost me. I had raging, weepy eczema, and allergic asthma, and I always felt bad when I had flare ups, like it was my fault entirely. I couldn’t play sport, and I hid the back of my knees, and tonight I was watching, and crying a little, and the eczema at the back of my knees was calling my fingers, and my chest was tight from being sick, and I needed, needed an asthma pump, and Toni was dancing, and fluttering, and living each moment of the story. And now I must warn you because I can’t leave it out, but the dog, the dalmatian, Luigi. The dog that Toni inhabits, the dog.
I can say this most honestly. I have never experienced a show, a story that tore into me. I understand tonight what it feels like when something goes like an arrow to the heart.
And it wasn’t the song that played, but I got Comfortably Numb in my head. “When I was a child I had a fever, my hands felt just like two balloons, now I’ve got that feeling once again, I can’t explain, you would not understand, this is not how I am.”
I don’t know what else to say. I am weepy writing this. I think it will be sold out again so you should go see it.
What: The Cottonwool Kid
Where and when: Theatre Arts until 27 September 2025
Tickets: Theatre Arts
WS
