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SCENE IT: Viviers is delicately devastating in MOFFIE
- Maria Kearns
- Sep 7
- 2 min read
Maria Kearns
The thing about secret, illegal wars is that they’re not supposed to be talked about. How astounding, then, that a young conscript managed to keep a diary of his time in the South African Defence Force’s brutal training camps and his deployment to the Angolan border to help hunt ‘terrorists’ in 1979.
André Carl van der Merwe’s recollections would later become the novel MOFFIE, which has been adapted for the stage by Philip Rademeyer and directed by Greg Karvellas. This production has now had its South African première after an Off-West End première in London in 2024.
David Viviers delivers a delicately devastating performance as Nicholas, a young man roundly suspected of being the worst thing a man could be in the old South Africa: sensitive, different, a sissy.
Viviers does an especially good job of letting Nicholas’ undimmable inner joy shine through even as the conscript is compelled to maintain a gruff, dead-eyed exterior in order to survive in a world of unrelenting violence and destruction. His performance is so entrancing that the show’s 85 minutes fly by in glorious defiance of the weighty subject matter.
Niall Griffin’s set, lighting, AV, and costume design provides the exact level of understated intensity required by the harrowing narrative and allows Viviers to move effortlessly between past and present as he weaves the threads of his character’s difficult upbringing and traumatic military experiences around the central, vulnerable frame that is his burgeoning sexuality —something he has to keep hidden from those around him at all costs. The unlit edges of the stage seem to represent a looming, menacing, ever-present threat: veer from the path set for you and be swallowed by the darkness.
The unsettling soundscape designed by Charl-Johan Lingenfelder seems to emanate from the centre of the earth, or perhaps straight from the depths of that particular hell Nicholas would be banished to were his secret to come out, and offers a striking underscore to Viviers’ performance.
This period of South African history is undeniably an extremely difficult one to revisit, especially in the intimate and unrelentingly confrontational setting of a theatre, but it can only be hoped that this won’t deter audiences from appreciating Viviers’ masterful telling of this painfully human story.
MOFFIE will be onstage at the Baxter’s Flipside Theatre until the 27 September 2025. Tickers can be booked online through Webtickets.
Please note the show has a rating of PG 16 for mature themes including bigotry, violence, sexual assault, child abuse, and suicide. It has a run time of 85 minutes (no interval).