As I waited in the foyer a few minutes before Buhle Ngaba’s BLING! was due to start, a voice behind me warned: “Watch out, a group of hormonal teenagers is about to arrive and take over the theatre.”Such news might fill other audience members with dread, but not me. Ngaba is a consummate performer who can captivate an audience of any age. Her latest one-woman creation is by no means pitched only at school learners. Still, it is an exemplar of how to take education out of the classroom, bringing history to life on stage and making it funny, engaging and poignant.BLING! has a quirky premise: the Cullinan diamonds escape their prison, the display case of the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London, and return to their country of origin. Once back in South Africa, however, they find that their glitter and sparkle is not a panacea to the socioeconomic ills inherited from the colonial period in which they were discovered. On the contrary, mining in postapartheid South Africa merely aggravates the human and natural exploitation of the past.The diamonds are represented (and, in fact, embodied) by the fabulous figure of Phatsima Khullinan. She is entirely unlikely and utterly believable, even familiar, a compound character we all know from social media and news clips: a wannabe influencer and entrepreneur, by turns superficial and sincere, charismatic but easily triggered into traumatic recall.She is millions of years old and remembers dimly what it was like to be forged by the pressures of rock and time, yet she is also naive when it comes to the human capacity for greed and deception. That is how she ends up on the wrong side of the law, facing a trial by judge, jury, peers, audience, nation and history. By the end of BLING! you’re cheering for Phatsima’s freedom, even as you feel complicit in her sentencing.Ngaba and her director, Ilana Dlangalala-Cilliers, make excellent use of a simple but adaptable set. A tall perspex box serves both as a royal loot display case and as an elevated courtroom dock while also gesturing to a diamond’s journey from the depths of Mother Earth to the grasping hands at the surface.A plastic sheet is Phatsima’s sexy couture at one point but later, in an astonishing piece of staging, it becomes transformed into the koppies of the platinum belt on which the Lonmin miners protested and were killed. Ngaba invokes the Marikana massacre with sensitivity and it is one of various moments when the jocular mood of the show shifts into solemnity, anger and grief.Urgent social issues are likewise treated deftly, such as when Phatsima refuses to be drawn into “one of those gender-based violence campaigns” — even though Ngaba is attentive throughout to the patriarchal strand linking her themes of colonial conquest, capitalist duplicity, political corruption and consumerist excess.If this sounds portentous, BLING! is anything but that. Instead, it is a wild ride through popular culture, with Phatsima singing and dancing her way into the hardest of hearts. This is a media-dense encounter and the tech is seamless, with film material immersing us in adverts for get-rich-quick schemes and “fong kong” products or taking us onto the street as Phatsima seeks celebrity. Equally effective are the projections of a live phone camera video feed. There are also novelty props employed to great effect, like a bubble dispenser that is used in jewellery cleaning and to pour champagne.Not unlike the Cullinan diamonds, BLING! has — until recently — been displayed for the pleasure of audiences in the Global North: after premiering at the Wiener Festwochen in Austria in 2024 it was performed at the Afrovibes Festival in the Netherlands last year. Well, Phatsima is finally home. The show enjoyed a stint in Cape Town before the present run in Johannesburg, and it is to be hoped that Ngaba has the opportunity to tour widely around South Africa. Maybe Phatsima will even find an audience near her birthplace just outside Pretoria or 100km west, in Marikana, revisiting the mining site that gives the lie to postapartheid prosperity narratives.‘BLING!’ is at the Ramolao Makhene Theatre, Market Square, until May 31.