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Brutal and disarming — Moffie urges us to question authority

Brutal and disarming — Moffie urges us to question authority
Director Greg Karvellas (left) and actor Kai Luke Brümmer in rehearsal. Set designer Niall Griffin looks on. Photo: Daniel Rutland Manners
Keith Bain
By Keith Bain
18 Jun 2024
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Kai Luke Brümmer shines in the stage version of the critically acclaimed film and autobiography Moffie, which tackles toxic masculinity and homophobia in the story of a gay South African conscript.

Head shaved, in blue jeans and a black T-shirt, Kai Luke Brümmer paced back and forth in the far corner of a rehearsal room somewhere in the labyrinthine basement of the Baxter Theatre Centre. He was waiting for his cue as a small industry audience filed in to witness the first complete run-through of a brand-new play that was being rehearsed in Cape Town ahead of its world premiere in London.

As we settled in our seats, Brümmer slung an army duffel bag over his shoulder and stepped into the centre of the makeshift stage, nothing but a few wooden boxes standing in for a set. With his boyish good looks, large almond-shaped blue eyes, chiselled jaw, cheekbones as high as ever, he held us in the palm of his hand for almost 90 minutes, a gutsy, tender performance that crackled and blazed like an electric storm.

By the end of it, there were plenty of tears in the room, evidence of an audience being touched deeply.

Critically acclaimed film


It’s been almost five years since Brümmer, a Johannesburg-born actor who trained at the  University of Cape Town, was hailed by critics at the 76th Venice Film Festival for his performance in the Oliver Hermanus film Moffie.

Based on the 2006 autobiographical novel by Cape Town-based André Carl van der Merwe, the film is a harrowing and beautiful coming-of-age story that opens some raw wounds by sending its gay protagonist into the South African Defence Force. He does what he must to survive the brutality of basic training while witnessing an onslaught of dehumanising atrocities, many of them aimed at anyone suspected of being gay.

Van der Merwe wrote the novel using the dairies he kept as a teenager and while in the army, having been conscripted in the late 1970s and sent to participate in the clandestine border war that was raging between South Africa and the so-called terrorists in Angola. Some of what’s rendered in the film seems unspeakable, such deplorable acts witnessed by a sensitive lad also trying to navigate his own sexual awakening.

In the film, a full head of dark-blond hair intact, Brümmer gives a scintillating performance as the eponymous “moffie”, Nicholas van der Swart, forced to endure various forms of oppression, violence, cruelty and name-calling at the hands of bigoted officers before being sent to the Caprivi Strip, where he’s expected to carry out a crusade of slaughter or become fodder for the apartheid military machine.

Moffie In another scene from the film, Kai Luke Brümmer is watched by another conscript, played by actor Ryan de Villiers. Photo: Supplied



Heartbreaking and visceral, the role made steep demands on Brümmer. In turn, critics raved about his magnetic, quietly intelligent performance, and the film drew resounding praise. In Venice, where it was nominated for the Orizzonti Prize and the Queer Lion Award, its premiere garnered a six-minute standing ovation.

In Greece, it won the Mermaid Award (for the best LGBTQI-themed film) at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, and it garnered the Jury Prize at the Dublin International Film Festival. Sadly, the film’s local cinema release coincided with the country’s pandemic shutdown in March 2020.

Gruelling stage performance


Moffie’s adaptation for the stage comes at a time when South African theatre has been fighting not only for survival but to stay relevant. It comes less than a year after the success of the translation into a play of The Promise, a novel that earned local author Damon Galgut the 2021 Booker Prize.

Moffie is the first international play directed by Greg Karvellas, who for years was artistic director of Cape Town’s Fugard Theatre. Now living in Berlin, he was approached to direct by theatre producer Eric Abraham, who also co-produced the movie. Abraham has lived in the UK since 1977, when he fled South Africa after having been banned and placed under house arrest by the apartheid government for reporting on black resistance movements in the international media.

The two commissioned Cape Town author and playwright Philip Rademeyer to adapt the novel into a one-man show.

Brümmer said when Abraham approached him with the idea of doing Moffie as a one-person play, he was initially “baffled as to how they would pull it off”.

Moffie Kai Luke Brümmer as Nicholas van der Swart in the stage version of Moffie. (Photo: Daniel Rutland Manners)



Kai Luke Brümmer as Nicholas van der Swart in the stage version of Moffie. (Photo: Daniel Rutland Manners)



Kai Luke Brümmer as Nicholas van der Swart in Moffie. (Photo: Daniel Rutland Manners)



“I was also apprehensive about having done this story before,” Brümmer said after the gruelling run in the Baxter’s rehearsal room.

“But the play’s text is so different from the screenplay. It’s closer to the novel, which in my mind is more brutal than the film.”

Rademeyer’s translation for the stage is, in fact, an entirely different beast from the movie. For one thing, Brümmer is entirely alone on stage, an utterly absorbing presence as he conjures an entire universe of emotions through a succession of vignettes and memories that are woven together like a chronologically untethered fever dream. It is breathtakingly intimate, a different sort of bravery demanded from the 31-year-old actor who brings to life various moments from Nicholas’s young life.

It’s a hard ask, Brümmer essentially delivering a 90-minute monologue without reprieve, not even a sip of water.

“It’s an incredibly tough play and it is emotionally taxing,” said Brümmer, highlighting that it makes “very different demands” compared with his film performance, which “was kind of very internal and restrained”.

By contrast, the play requires him to give voice to all his bottled-up feelings, to express and share his most private yearnings as he narrates events, shares his character’s hopes and fears, gives outward expression to what haunts him – and what turns him on.

Aside from the extreme intimacy, the immediacy of having the audience right there, the play also requires him to switch roles, often in a heartbeat, as he briefly steps into cameo renditions of some of the other characters, be it a bigoted army officer barking insults or his homophobic, violent father. Not only must he whip in and out of quite contrary characters, but he must also breeze back and forth in time, one moment channelling a boyhood version of Nicholas, the next sweating it out as a bewildered soldier in Angola.

Karvellas said that he wanted the play to “feel like a nightmare”, in that it’s like a ceaseless onslaught of images and memory fragments. “It’s when you’re lying in bed and you’re thinking about the most embarrassing time, the scariest time, the happiest time,” he said, “because memory works that way; it’s fragmented. We jump around a lot because I want it to feel like we’re in Nicholas’s memory palace.”

Weaponised slur


Embedded among his memories is this word, moffie – a pejorative term that was pervasive and quite acceptable in the South African lexicon of the Seventies and Eighties – which Nicholas hears from his father, his officers and from fellow recruits. It denotes anything from faintly effeminate behaviour to being a nuisance, being soft, or even being English.

In the military context, “moffie” is used as a weaponised slur, used repeatedly to break the young recruits, strip away their humanity, emasculate, belittle and shame them.

The reminder is that, according to this apartheid army’s rules, moffies – 'faggots' – are lesser humans, akin to communists, terrorists and liberals. Being a moffie or a sissie is an intolerable offence, and the officers Nicholas describes use it deliberately to keep meek recruits in line.

Aside from the ceaseless threat of punishments and humiliation that hung over their heads, secretly gay recruits also existed in perpetual fear of being sent to the grotesque-sounding Ward 22, an army asylum where drug addicts, madmen and homosexuals were subjected to untold terrors, including experimental conversion therapies. Many who went in did not survive.

Though Moffie is about the particular agony of isolation and terror of being gay in a homophobic system, it’s also a conversation about masculinity – toxic masculinity, specifically – that is as relevant today as it was in 1979, long before terms like “woke” were in use.

It’s about male inheritance, about where our patriarchal values come from. It questions the manner in which men were being “made” at a particular time. And it asks whether circumstances have changed – whether, and to what extent, 30 years into our democracy, the emotional wounds inflicted during those times persist.

And it is not only about being gay in the army. In fact, the play feels incredibly prescient in this time when wars are flaring up and European governments that have for so long been against conscription are once again discussing it.

Director Greg Karvellas (left) and actor Kai Luke Brümmer in rehearsal. Set designer Niall Griffin looks on. (Photo: Daniel Rutland Manners)


Living in a free world


So it is a weighty production and incredibly demanding. But Brümmer is no stranger to difficult stage roles.

Before making the film, he starred in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a beautiful play about a 15-year-old boy with autism. His performance earned him a Naledi Award for best actor.

His capacity to convincingly play characters younger than himself meant he was also excellent as the schoolboy in ‘Master Harold’… and the Boys. The Athol Fugard play was directed by Karvellas, and it was Brümmer’s last stage performance before he moved to the UK just as Covid struck.

On the back of the film’s huge critical success, he had signed with agents overseas and relocated to London in hopes of accelerating his career. “But then Covid hit and then there was a writer’s strike and then there was an actor’s strike,” he said.

Instead of doing the work he loves, he’s been stringing odd jobs together. Brümmer has taken advantage of the pause in his career. “It’s been incredibly liberating,” he said. “It’s the first time in my life since I was a little boy that I’ve had the time to ask myself who I am outside of acting.”

Having gone straight from drama school into the industry, he said the acting drought since moving abroad has given him space for self-reflection.

“Working odd jobs for minimum wage can be really dispiriting for an actor, but I think I’ve gained valuable life lessons doing just that. As actors, we need to broaden our understanding of the world, and there’s nothing like working 12-hour shifts where people treat you like shit to figure out how the social environment works.

“It’s been a way to step out of my privilege... As thrilled as I am to be acting again, I’m grateful for the three years of trying to figure out who I am.”

Brümmer said that, as an actor, he’s committed to making work that speaks to “the larger social and political landscape that we’re in”. “I think being a white-born South African comes with a lot of baggage. A lot of our history has to do with benefiting from the oppression of others.”

He said although Moffie is about a young man in an army that perpetuated the apartheid system, what cannot be ignored is “the correlation between what was happening then and what’s currently going on in Palestine where apartheid exists and a genocide is being perpetrated”.

“Our artistic statement,” Karvellas said, “is that the men who are... trying to tell us to be something that we’re not should not be able to touch us. That’s our mission with this play – it’s a reminder that we’ve got to question authority rather than get sucked into the machine. Whether that machine is social media, the news cycle or politics.

“It’s about questioning those in charge, rather than being subjugated by them.”

At a time when right-wing authoritarianism is flaring up, Moffie is a reminder to thinking individuals that if they wish to live in a free world, “they need to constantly question the system, question the status quo, question existing power structures”, Karvellas said.

“The thing that jumped off the page for me more than anything else is the hope in the play,” said Brümmer. “As much as it’s very heavy and what this character goes through is incredibly tough, I think there is so much love in it. I think it really captures this idea of hope as a form of resistance. That’s the message it contains for anyone who is being persecuted or marginalised.”

Moffie will run at London’s Riverside Studios until 30 June. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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