It’s 1997 and two men meet on a train. A white man and a black man. They drink some beer. Six hours later, towards the end of the journey, the white man tells the black man a story which makes the black man very angry. The black man writes a story about the encounter which is published in The Guardian, and sets him on the road to fame and fortune as a journalist and writer. Some 20 years later the white man turns up unannounced at the black man’s Hampstead house. The black man is appalled, worried for his young family, and then the stakes get higher.

Paul Herzberg’s adaptation of his ten-minute video makes for a riveting night at the theatre. The video was written and recorded as part of a series made by Elysium Theatre during Covid, and you can see it on their website. It’s a striking piece, and provides the core incident which sets off the play. Herzberg has added material and developed the relationship between the two men, but the essence of the relationship, the white man’s horrifying story and the black man’s reaction to it, remains central to the piece.

The white man, Marius Muller, played by Micky Cochrane, is a South African Boer who fought against the ANC in the struggle to overcome apartheid. The black man, John Josana played by Faz Singhateh, is the son of a freedom fighter who escaped with his father, first to Germany and then to England, when he was a little boy, just after the Soweto uprising in 1976. The story involves an atrocity inflicted by Muller on a black ‘terrorist’ prisoner, which Muller seems to regard as an act of mercy. Josana is appalled, and thinks Muller is asking forgiveness, which he is not prepared to grant. When Muller turns up in Hampstead, a lot of water has gone under the bridge, but the wounds remain and have made other stuff happen.  

At one level, this is a story about colonialism and its lasting after-effects; at another it’s about two men, each oppressed in their own way, both trying to make sense of the rest of their lives, connected by the same political and moral tragedy.

Singhateh and Cochrane give strong performances of these two troubled men. The conceit is that they have come together for one time only to tell their stories to us, the audience. The direct address is powerful, and director Jake Murray has done a fine job of teasing out the detail.

I saw the production at the end of a two-month run of studios and small venues. It deserves a further life in some of our grander palaces of culture. In a world where politics is more extreme than at any point in my 70-odd years, and I still come out of theatres wondering ‘why on earth did they put that on?’, it’s satisfying to see a play about stuff that matters. 

By Chris Wallis, Theatre Editor

Main image: credit Victoria Wai Photography