Moffie — no easy trip down memory lane

Hatred and bigotry are ritualistically exorcised in Moffie, a one-man stage play during which the actor David Viviers delivers a propulsive and emotionally devastating 85-minute monologue. 

Throughout a gripping, masterful performance he holds you in the palm of his hand, consoling you with a tale so tautly, truthfully told that it will likely make your heart feel as though it’s about to explode. 

It’s breathtakingly intimate, too, demanding a sort of calm, collected, introspective bravery from the actor who is such an absorbing presence as he leads us through a succession of memories woven together like a furious fever dream of colliding emotions.

They’re the memories of Nicholas van der Swart, sent for army training in the prime of his life, along with the rest of South Africa’s apartheid-era white males. Sent there, he tells us, as fodder for a war that has nothing to do with him. So, too, into the bosom of a war against a communist “swart gevaar” that was so clandestine, it never officially happened.

It starts with the oppressive thunder of a helicopter, part of the play’s carefully crafted soundscape. Somewhere below the roar and tumult of chopper blades, within the sweltering heat and wretched gloom of apartheid-era warmongering, Nicholas the narrator reaches back into his memories and begins to tell his story. Or at least those parts of it that in their own mystical, magical way reveal the tale of how he discovered his identity in the midst of a dehumanising hellscape.

Based on the autobiographical novel by André Carl van der Merwe and written with such transcendent humanity by Cape Town playwright Philip Rademeyer, it’s a breathtakingly personal survey of the horrors and hardships of the apartheid-era military machine with all its venom and abuse, and, more specifically, it elucidates many of the specific cruelties inflicted by that army on gay men or anyone suspected of being so inclined. 

Central to Nicholas’s experience of that traumatic period in his life – basic training and being sent to the unofficial “border war” – are his very particular memories of coming out (to himself), his discovery of raging hormones and hard-hitting love, and his racing heart in the presence of someone who potentially loves him back.

Aside from the intricacy of the tightrope he must walk to balance these simultaneous conditions – being lovestruck in a system built on hate – the play also requires Viviers to regularly switch roles, often in a heartbeat, as he briefly steps into cameos of other characters, be it a bigoted and quite terrifying army officer barking insults, or his aggressively homophobic father. 

And, sometimes, he brings to life softer, gentler, more loveable men, including those who stole his heart.

Not only does he whip in and out of quite contrary characters, but he breezes back and forth in time, one moment channelling a boyhood version of Nicholas, the next sweating it out as a bewildered soldier in Angola where he is confronted non-stop with scenes of direst barbarism. 

As much as the awfulness is unflinchingly described, there’s plenty of sublime poetry, too, instances when Nicholas immaculately accounts for the ways in which love and lust create the sensation of pure energy pulsing through his entire being. 

There is a kind of ethereal power in Nicholas’s recollections of male bodies, descriptions of physical attraction through the eyes of a young man coming to terms with what it is that turns him on and causes his heart to do backflips. Even his sojourns to the barracks bathroom to masturbate to illicit images in his head become windows into his soul – because even such private occasions are conveyed with such frankness, and give such an honest sense of his loneliness, and his fear of being caught out.

While Moffie is about the particular agonies of isolation and terror of being gay in a homophobic system – one in which homosexuality was illegal and could land army recruits in a notoriously dangerous mental asylum – it is also about the values and traumas inherited by successive generations of men. 

The play visualises this generational trauma with Niall Griffin’s deceptively simple set design: at the centre of the performance space, a pile of army-issue duffel bags which director Greg Karvellas refers to as the “pile of trauma”, a metaphoric manifestation of collected anguish that’s handed down father to son. It’s baggage that is built upon one generation to the next.

At the same time, the duffels look like body bags, a visual metaphor for the consequences of hatred, of violence, and of the army that is essentially a machine for turning young men – boys, really – into cadavers. 

The other place where the trauma expressed in the play is felt viscerally, is in Charl-Johan Lingenfelder’s soundscape, which brings such a multidimensional richness to the remembered world to which Nicholas returns. While the soundtrack’s recordings, effects, voices and music evoke environments and moods (and practical details such as the aforementioned helicopter), it also in moments stirs a deep sense of unease, of something terrifying simmering just below the surface. It evokes the pressure cooker of our not-so-long-ago past – a brutal society where violence and repression were pretty much the order of the day.

Moffie is not only a play about being gay in the military, nor is it only about uniquely harrowing South African realities. It’s sharply universal and in fact feels incredibly prescient at this moment when wars are rife and various governments, many of them for so long against conscription, are once again looking to institute the draft, calling young men like Nicholas to take up arms in service of conflicts that have nothing to do with them – and that they do not wish to be part of.

“This play is for thinking individuals trying to live in a free world,” Karvellas says. “We believe that the way to achieve this is to constantly question the system. Moffie is about refusing to be sucked into the system, whatever system that might be. Instead, question everything: authority, social media, the status quo, everything.” 

If Moffie feels closer to a spiritual reckoning than your typical night at the theatre, it might be because it manages to transcend the realm of art and become an act of resistance. It’s theatre that possesses the magical ability to set us free.

For Nicholas, the magical ingredient is love. And his story is the age-old tale of love vanquishing hate. 

At a time when hate is on the rise, Moffie is a play about hope. No matter what your convictions are, you should go and see it. Because there are few things more vital for our survival right now than the capacity to exorcise the darkness by believing very deeply in its opposite. DM

Moffie is playing at The Baxter’s Flipside Theatre until 27 September.