How Bitter Winter teaches us to make room for each other

Bitter Winter, written by Paul Slabolepszy and directed by Lesedi Job, follows the unravelled life of once-renowned actor Jean-Louis Lourens (played by André Odendaal) and TV star Prosper Mangane (Oarabile Ditsele), who find themselves auditioning for roles in a cowboy film.

What begins as an awkward encounter soon cracks open into something far more personal, a reckoning with age, race, pride and belonging. Chantal Stanfield appears in a supporting role.

By the time I saw Bitter Winter for the second time, I already knew it had settled under my skin.

I went first with a close friend, and then again with my partner and each time, we sat in quiet tears. The play didn’t shout, but it left a mark. What stayed with me wasn’t just the characters or the plot. It was the space between them, the ache of what goes unsaid, the invisible weight we all carry.

That’s where the play lived for me.

In the pauses, the slow work of trying to reach one another. It’s a story that is at once sharply funny and quietly devastating, the kind of play that makes you laugh through a lump in your throat. But what truly lifts it is the rare, electric alchemy between Odendaal and Ditsele. I’ve never seen a stage dynamic quite like theirs. They are effervescent together - listening, giving, sparring - as if their performances are tuned to some private frequency the rest of us are lucky to bear witness to.

I sat down with André Odendaal, the formidable lead, to talk about that space - the unnameable place where ageing, loss, and language meet.

“When I first read the script, I didn’t think, oh wow, what a role,” he said. “I thought, this is something I need to do. Because of what it says about this time. In our country. In the world. Especially for older people who are often pushed aside, ignored. We still have something to offer.”

Odendaal is clear-eyed about what it means to grow older in a culture that equates youth with value.

“I finally feel like I know what I’m doing,” he said. “And just as I’ve mastered something, I’m supposed to step aside? No. Ageing isn’t just about decline. It’s also about power. About knowledge hard-won. We have to stop pretending that older people are done. They’re not. They’re still contributing, still dreaming.”

Bitter Winter lives in this liminal space, between relevance and invisibility, between youth and fragility. But it also does something else. It brings people together across gulfs we often think of as fixed: race, class, age.

“People walk out of the theatre and tell me they saw their father, or their neighbour, or themselves,” Odendaal says.

“That’s the power of the play. You’re not being preached to. You’re feeling it. And feeling is dangerous these days.”

Dangerous, he explains, because so many of us are terrified of emotion. “Social media makes it easy to be cruel, to be flippant, to never touch what’s real. But in theatre, there’s no hiding. Emotion hits you full in the chest. It releases something.”

The intergenerational tension between Odendaal’s character and Ditsele’s is electric. “We’d never met before the first rehearsal,” Odendaal explains. “But from the beginning, there was no ‘young black actor’ and ‘older white actor’ nonsense. We just knew, we were two people, making something together. And that trust? That’s everything. You can’t fake it.”

That trust, in many ways, mirrors what the play asks of its audience: to witness, to soften, to make room. Room for contradiction. Room for change. Room for someone else’s truth, even when it’s not palatable.

Because at its core, Bitter Winter is about exactly that: the slow, sometimes clumsy, often tender journey through cultural and racial misunderstanding.

It doesn’t offer easy resolution. It traces how two men, divided by age, race, and life experience, begin to find areas of overlap. Through conflict and discomfort, they start to build a kind of shared vocabulary - not just of words, but of gesture, silence, recognition. What emerges isn’t just connection; it’s the beginning of a new language, forged in discomfort, made possible by willingness.

The power of Bitter Winter lies not only in its storytelling, but in how it invites us to feel our way through the hard work of making room for each other. It does what few things still manage, it bypasses defensiveness and reaches for something deeper, something felt in the body before the brain catches up.

And yet, it’s exactly this kind of work: honest, risky, emotionally intelligent, that is so often undervalued in South Africa.

The arts remain underfunded, overlooked, reduced to nice-to-haves in a political economy that sees little return in vulnerability.

Odendaal told me that they started the play with no funding at all.

“I mean, we did this on nothing. No money. No support. Just belief. It was painful and also beautiful. And now it’s grown into this thing people need. Because it speaks to where we are as a nation. Not where we pretend to be, but where we are.”

Bitter Winter manages to create space for hard things such as grief, aspiration, and economic desperation without retreating into sentimentality.

“There’s a scene,” Odendaal says, “where my character says, ‘I need this job.’ Later, Ditsele’s character says the same thing. And it lands differently, but equally. That’s the equaliser. That’s the human core.”

We talk, too, about language, how it binds and betrays. The play moves fluidly between English, Afrikaans, and isiXhosa, offering no subtitles, no footnotes.

“You might not understand every word,” Odendaal says, “but you feel it. You hear the sound of South Africa.” That sound - sometimes dissonant, sometimes aching with recognition - pulses through the work. The play’s use of language, like its treatment of age, is complex. It neither romanticises nor rejects. It simply asks us to stay with the discomfort. To keep listening. To stop looking away.

“Ultimately,” Odendaal says, “this play is about creating space. In our hearts. In our homes. In our public life. For what we think is ‘other.’ And the arts? The arts help us do that. They allow us to see ourselves and each other, not as enemies, but as echoes.”

That, to me, is reason enough to protect the arts: not as decoration, but as infrastructure for a more humane society.

If we want to shift how we see one another, how we hold difference, how we repair what’s been broken, then theatre must be part of that work. It deserves more than our applause. It deserves our support.

As we wrapped up, I found myself thinking not just about Bitter Winter, but about all the stories that never make it to the stage, the ones silenced by lack of funding, exhausted networks, or sheer fatigue.

This play is a reminder that theatre still has the power to stir something in us, to help us sit longer with the discomfort, and maybe, just maybe, to find one another across it. We need more of that. And we need to make sure those who bring it to life are able to keep doing so. DM

Joy Watson is a Daily Maverick contributor; she has worked as a researcher and policy advisor to national states as well as in the global policy arena. Currently, she works for the Institute for Security Studies and the Sexual Violence Research Initiative. Her debut novel, The Other Me, was a finalist for the UJ Prize in 2023.

Bitter Winter is at the Baxter Theatre until 14 June 2025.

If you’re moved to support the people who make this kind of work possible, consider contributing to the Theatre Benevolent Fund, a quiet lifeline for performers and theatre-makers facing crisis.