Photo credit: Victoria Wai
The Moth
by Paul Herzberg
The Finborough Theatre, 118 Finborough Road, London SW10 | until 21 November 2026
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Review by William Russell
“Powerful performances overlong play.”
Superb performances from Fax Singhateh and Mickey Cochhrane as two south Africans, one black, one white, who meet on a train in 1997 travelling from Dundee to London are one reason for seeing this over long play based on a garlanded with awards monologue written during Covid which in its expanded form at times keeps relentlessly going over the same ground. Singhateh is John Josana, a black Guardian journalist travelling south from a lecture in a crowded train. Cochrane is Marius Muller, a white South African, who takes the seat opposite which is free. He wants to talk and tells of his experiences in that forgotten war in Angola in 1976 – the moth of the title is the sound is something flying away he heard when he carried out a mercy killing on a dying man. Josana, a journalist who fled with his father to Germany after Soweto, does what journalists do – writes about it and so launches himself into a television career on a programme called Confessional on which the two men meet again, as indeed they do over the years as both have a shared past they need to escape and make sense of. One is escaping the horrors of life under apartheid and in Nazi Germany, the other the brutality of his Nazi father and the killing of that dying black man. It is complicated and at times bewildering as one is not always sure exactly where one is – it starts on Confessional and is ages before the relevance of the title is disclosed. At one point I began wondering had I come to the wrong play which is not what Herzberg intended. As the evening proceeds in fits and starts - director Jake Murray really should have tightened the piece so that it moved much more speedily – everything, however, comes together. As always at the Finborough there is a splendid set consisting of little more than a table and a couple of chairs with a screen behind on which are shown scenes from the train journey and from the events in the men's separate lives. It works brilliantly, especially when at last we meet Josana's mother, one of the ghosts from his past, although to say the train is approaching King's Cross while showing some well forested countryside is careless. The two men maybe reach some kind of resolution for past guilt and mistakes before one reckons finally going their separate ways. But at two hours, even with an interval, the play is exhausting to sit through, the redeeming features, the performances apart, being how it brings back terrible times, forgotten in the case of Angola, less so of South Africa under apartheid and surprisingly that Nazi Germany could ever have been seen as somewhere safe to escape to.
Cast
Faz Singhateh – John Josana
Micky Cochrane – Marius Muller
Adjoa Andoh – the voice of Josana' mother
Creatives
Director – Jake Murray
Set Des8gner – Amelia Mitchell
Sound and Music – Paul C Clark
Video and Film – Paul C Clark and Amelia Mitchell
Lighting Designer – Simon Cole
