A Tender, Unflinching Journey Through Grief, Art and Young Love by Alyssa Dionne, Matthew Vey and Morne Visser
I Can’t Speak for Freddy, written by and starring Alyssa Dionne (and Matthew Vey) that is directed by Morne Visser, sits firmly in the must-see category of Cape Town live theatre productions for 2026. Tickets for their final run of I Can’t Speak for Freddy comes to The Outlore Base, 80 Hout Street, 27–28 August where tickets are R120. There are some theatre productions you watch once and remember. Then there are the ones you watch twice, only to realise that the second viewing has somehow opened an entirely different door.
Having now experienced the production twice with its final debut at the Homecoming Centre on Buitenkant Street, I found myself returning to the same room, the same characters and the same story, yet leaving with entirely different questions. This is not a love story in the conventional sense. It is a story about grief, friendship, art, ambition and the strange, often bruising brevity of young love.
And, perhaps most importantly, it is about the things we carry long after we believe we have put them down.
The room is dark when we enter. There is an intimacy to the staging that immediately draws the audience inward, as though we have been invited into the private corners of Andrea Kidd’s memory.
Andrea, played by Dionne herself, is an aspiring writer with the hopeful optimism of someone still learning how much the world can take from you. Freddy Coleman, played by Matthew Vey, is her enigmatic classmate, witty and magnetic with an underlying darkness that gradually becomes impossible to ignore.
The two meet through the turbulent ecosystem of theatre school, where competition, creativity and insecurity are constantly rubbing shoulders. What begins as friendship develops into something softer, messier and more emotionally charged.
There is a rain-soaked walk home. There are conversations that linger. There is the unmistakable electricity of first love.
And then there is grief.
What makes I Can’t Speak for Freddy so compelling is that grief is never treated as a neat, linear journey. It does not arrive in five conveniently labelled stages. It doesn’t behave itself. It doesn’t wait patiently in the wings for its cue.
Instead, it moves. It swells, recedes, returns and changes colour.
If I were to describe the emotional landscape of this production, I would describe it as a library of blue. Not one blue, but hundreds of them. There is the pale blue of nostalgia, the grey-blue of numbness, the electric blue of first love and the almost-black blue of the moments we don’t know how to speak about.
Andrea’s grief carries a sense of restoration. Having already experienced the loss of her father, she understands something about the strange loneliness of absence. Her memories of Freddy become both wound and refuge, allowing her to revisit the tenderness of what existed alongside the pain of what was lost.
Freddy, meanwhile, embodies another side of grief altogether.
His character inhabits that inertia that can come with suffering. The withdrawal. The bleakness. The inability to articulate what is happening internally while everyone around you assumes that silence means nothing is wrong. He becomes Andrea’s “blackest shade of blue”.
And it is here that the production becomes particularly uncomfortable, because Freddy’s pain is not presented in isolation. It exists within an environment that continually asks young people to perform, compete, succeed and prove themselves. The theatre school becomes its own pressure cooker. At the centre of this is Mr Porter, whose role as a cruel and calculating professor further complicates the relationship between Andrea and Freddy. Their academic rivalry becomes inseparable from their personal wounds, with the invisible hand of competition pushing two already vulnerable students further into themselves.
Art becomes both their refuge and their battleground.
One of the most fascinating threads running through the play is the idea that life imitates art just as much as art imitates life. Andrea and Freddy’s experiences begin bleeding into the work they create, while their creative development forces them to confront the very things they would rather leave buried.
For Andrea, there is the yearning for love, belonging and connection. For Freddy, there is the fear of abandonment. And somewhere between the two sits a friendship where boundaries become blurred and loyalties are tested.
We as an audience become caught in the crossfires between the once inseparable classmates, returning to the shaky tightropes that is an all-too-familiar estrangement bereft of compassion – because there is simply too much love, and nowhere to put it.
A pivotal moment arrives when Freddy reads one of Andrea’s diary entries, written as prose for an academic submission. What might initially appear to be an artistic transgression becomes something much more intimate. Trust is broken, private emotions are exposed and the delicate architecture of their friendship begins to collapse.
It is a reminder that artists are often asked to mine their own lives for material, but there is a tremendous difference between choosing to share your story and having someone else take it from you.
Dionne’s writing gives the production room to breathe within these contradictions. As writer, actor and producer, her investment in Andrea is palpable. She brings an understanding of the character’s optimism without allowing it to become naïve, while her direction of the emotional journey gives the audience enough space to sit with discomfort rather than rushing us towards resolution.
Vey’s Freddy is equally affecting. His performance captures the frustrating complexity of someone who can be simultaneously funny, intelligent, charismatic and deeply troubled. There are moments when his humour becomes a shield, and others where the shield slips just enough for us to glimpse what sits underneath. This, being illustrated by his perfectly white ‘porcelain mask that cracks’ in the heat of Porter’s pressure cooker forcing a vent of deeply personal devastation. The steam in turn, burns Andrea’s hands with a hurtful red hand in her dual role competing for the aspired protegé position that only these two pivotal young artists vie for.
Visser’s direction brings these performances into an intimate, emotionally concentrated space. His experience across theatre, film and television is evident in the production’s ability to feel cinematic without losing the raw immediacy of live performance.
And that, perhaps, is the magic of theatre.
There is no edit button. No opportunity to soften a moment in post-production. The audience sits in the same room as the performers and experiences every pause, silence, breath and shift in energy together. And the loud silence echoes like the sharp twangs of heartstrings being plucked.
Watching I Can’t Speak for Freddy for a second time made me think about why we need the arts in the first place.
I believe life imitates art. But I also believe that art teaches us how to live with life. Without art, we can’t escape – nor can we metabolise the hard-to-digest themes of struggle, tragedy, beauty, joy, and all of the shades of blue we feel bubbling under the surface that we simply can’t express. Grief as a theme rings true to home for me, in its azure-tinged film that coats our tongues and throats when the foam blows upwards from our chests into the words we never end up saying. As Andrea poignantly reflects, ‘I loved with everything except my words’.
We watch tragedies and recognise fragments of ourselves. We see joy and wonder and reflect our own experiences onto the canvas. We listen to music when words fail us. We laugh at stand-up comedy because sometimes absurdity is the only sensible response to existence. We sit in dark theatres and allow strangers to tell us stories about grief, love, failure, ambition and fear. And somehow, the enormous questions become a little easier to digest.
The arts take these great, unwieldy chunks of human experience and give them somewhere to land. A safe place, a non-confrontational conversation spoken by separate entities from ourselves – and takes form in the warmth we feel spread from our insides as it seeks comfort in the expressions we can relate to. I Can’t Speak for Freddy does exactly that.
It doesn’t offer an easy answer to grief. It doesn’t ask us to neatly categorise Freddy or Andrea, nor to force judgement over the deep flaws each role-player portray. Instead, it invites us to sit with the complicated, often contradictory reality of being young, loving people, losing people and trying desperately to make sense of ourselves while we’re still becoming.
Perhaps that is why the production stayed with me. Perhaps that is why I wanted to watch it again. Because sometimes you don’t return to a story because you missed something.
You return because you’ve changed. And suddenly, the same words mean something completely different.
For a play about grief, I Can’t Speak for Freddy ultimately left me thinking about life. About the people who walk beside us for a chapter. About the things we say too late. About the things we never say at all, but haunt us in the chambers of our own heads. Our very own Mr Porters, pressure cookers of inert feeling that churn inside ourselves.
And about how, sometimes, the greatest act of remembering is simply allowing someone else’s story to be heard.
Maybe we can’t speak for Freddy. But we can listen.
Author’s note
I dedicate this post to a beloved friend that inspired me to always embrace the moments that we cherish, Muhammed Wallah. Within you, I found a sense of peaceful belonging in an unlikely and whacky friendship that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.