Closeted 17-year-old Nicholas van der Swart is conscripted into the South African Defence Force in the late 1970s, and plunged into a gruesome border war. The carnage makes his memories of a springbok hunt with his uncle look like scenes from Doctor Dolittle. But there’s another conflict which the SADF is prosecuting: the war against homosexuality.
Moffie, adapted by Philip Rademeyer from André Carl van der Merwe’s 2006 novel, takes its title from a homophobic slur that is as ubiquitous here as the throb of chopper blades. Alone on stage before a mound of military kit bags, to which he tellingly adds his own baggage, Nicholas describes the years spent concealing his desires. The baroque punishments of the psych ward await those who fail.
Kai Luke Brümmer previously played Nicholas in Oliver Hermanus’s 2019 film version, but what he does in this gripping one-man show is no mere encore. Embodying multiple characters, he turns on a dime between the terrorised conscript and his sniping fellow soldiers and barking drill sergeants. The effect is to transform his tormentors into branches of the same poisonous tree, with his father at the gnarled root of it all. The only misstep is employing a pre-recorded female voice for Nicholas’s mother when the role would have been within Brümmer’s impressive range.
The perspective has shifted, too. Nicholas is now looking back on his trauma, whereas on screen he was living it. This means Brümmer, in crew-cut and olive-green fatigues, must evoke the broken older man alongside the intact younger one. He finds solace in erotic reveries (“I imagine him emerging from the water like Ursula Andress …”) to which the film version had no access. This makes possible some alleviating interludes of humour amid the horror. During one fantasy, Nicholas reprimands himself: “Don’t go there! You can’t march if you’re hard.”
Shifts in mood, character and period are augmented by Niall Griffin’s lighting, which contrasts the blushing hue of Nicholas’s daydreams with reality’s jolting white light, every bit as harsh as a 4am barracks inspection. Charl-Johan Lingenfelder’s sound design conjures worlds through the clatter of cutlery or the nocturnal hum of insects. Under director Greg Karvellas, Brümmer’s performance is formidable, but still delicate enough to give the lie to Nicholas’s claim that “nothing gentle can survive here”.
• At Riverside Studios, London, until 30 June
