Daniel Nelson
Apartheid ended 30 years ago but though it underpins the plot of The Moth the play has relevance today because racism is again being legitimised by politicians.
“The play engages racial politics as a living, breathing reality that prowls with a raw ferocity,” says director Jake Murray, “and the legacy of apartheid that still affects its terrors today, the horror of war and the living purgatory for those affected by PTSD.”
“The horrors of the past seem to be forgotten, only to be repeated, either through ignorance, intent or through fear,” he wrote in a piece for the Anti-Apartheid Legacy Trust.
The play is a two-hour two- hander that stems from a long, beery conversation between two strangers on a train in the UK. John is a Black British journalist, the son of an anti-apartheid hero. Marius is an Afrikaner, who escaped his violent NAZI father by joining the South African army and fighting against Angola in the latter’s struggle for national and international independence.
Crucially, both men have a crippling emotional gap in their lives: their mothers left home when they were very young boys.
Their conversation is personal, awkward, loud, aggressive, truth-telling.
When the train slides into the station, they go their separate ways. But it is far from the end of their journey.
Their story shifts to John’s Hampstead flat, and the intensity of their confrontation is dramatised by plot twists that include a remarkably fortunate coincidence that detracts a little from the pure rage of the opening minutes.
It’s a psychological thriller, but it’s very much about race. And playwright Paul Herzberg knows what he’s talking about. He was a South African army conscript on the Namibian border during the Angolan war, before moving to the UK in 1976.
It’s also about forgiveness — seeking it, and giving it. In Herzberg’s words: “What it really is; Who has the right to confer it; whether it has any meaning in the context of human progress.”
It is one of the strengths of this sharply written, superbly acted and staged play that there’s no comfortable conclusion, or even a vague, optimistic final note to send us smiling through the Exit door. Nor should there be: the issues raised in The Moth are complicated and elusive. There are no easy answers. But the issues are definitely worth thinking about.
Post-show Q&As, 5, 12 and 19 November. The creative team behind The Moth will be joined by psychologists, creatives, politicians, journalists and others to discuss the show’s exploration of forgiveness, memory, trauma, and the legacy of Apartheid violence.
The Moth, £18 - £29, is at Finborough Theatre, 118 Finborough Road SW10 9ED, until 21 November. Info: Finborough