It’s 1979. South Africa is in conflict with neighbouring Angola to stop a perceived threat of communism, and so all white boys over the age of 16 are conscripted into military service. Training for service is brutal, demanding absolute obedience and conformity towards hyper-masculinity. It is the last place where you would want to be gay. To be a moffie. To be Nicolas, whose story this is.

Moffie, the novel by André Carl van Der Merwe, has already been adapted into a film, graphically showing the brutality of army life, but Philip Rademeyer’s stage adaptation presents the story solely through Nicolas telling his story, played here by Kai Luke Brümmer, who also played the role in the film.

The production is simply staged, with a black backdrop and a pile of canvas wrapped army boxes that serve as various locations and occasional props. Niall Griffin’s design and lighting thus effectively frames the sense of isolation that Nicolas clearly feels. These minimalist visuals are complemented by Charl Johan Lingenfelder’s beautiful soundscape that underscores the performance and transports the action between locations as diverse as the African bush at night, an engagement with the enemy and a tense family dinner.

Greg Karvallas’ direction keeps everything moving briskly along and the 85-minute (no interval) run time flies by.

But it is the terrific performance of Brümmer that gives this production its emotional weight. The monologue presents several challenges that Brümmer skilfully navigates. In non-linear time, we meet Nicolas as a very young boy, a teenager entering military service and a man at the end coming out (in all senses of that phrase). Brümmer moves between these different embodiments of Nicolas without any overt theatricals denoting which age he is but never leaving the audience confused over the narrative switches.

Brümmer also has to take on the toxic masculinity personas of the military personal who are doing their best to dehumanise the conscripts – his switches to these shock the audience. The only character that Brümmer does not voice is his mother, and while having him only voice the other male characters is probably a sound directorial decision, the recorded, off-stage, and slightly too loud female voice disrupts the dreamlike (and nightmarish) atmosphere that pervades the rest of the production.

The major challenge that Brümmer excels at is the transition of Nicolas from a brittle, defensive character, wounded, physically and mentally by his time in the forces and battling with shame and internalised homophobia, to someone who can accept that he is gay and finally, perhaps, have a love that dares to speak its name.

The juxtaposition of stories of Nicolas being taken deer hunting as a child and, in the army, tracking the spoor of a human prey gives a sense of how effective military training can be in dehumanising the supposed enemy. But it also opens up an issue which the remains largely unaddressed throughout the play: the tensions between the English and the Afrikaans, and between the straights and gays, are only a small part of the much bigger tensions embedded in the apartheid regime. While we get a strong sense of Nicolas’ difficulties in being oppressed within the army, we get less sense of his position towards the much broader political oppression that the army is shoring up.

Moffie is a powerful reminder of how fear of difference can manifest as aggression and the damage this does not only to the oppressed but also to the oppressor.

**** Four stars

Reviewed by: Mike Askew

Moffie runs at Riverside Studios until 30 June, with further info here.