South Africa’s secret Angolan border war returns to a London stage

What is playing in London, and why is it news now?

South Africa’s secretive war in Angola, fought half a century ago under a blanket of official silence, is playing out nightly on a London stage. The Moth, Paul Herzberg’s two-hour psychological thriller about a black journalist and a former apartheid soldier who meet by chance on a train, is in the final week of its London run at the Finborough Theatre, where it plays until 21 November. The production returned to the headlines on Saturday, when the Daily Maverick published a powerful account by the former foreign correspondent John Battersby, and the theatre confirmed four Fringe Theatre Awards nominations; for duo performance, direction, production and new writing. The nominations came shortly after the London premiere opened on 27 October, following a sell-out northern tour in 2025. The play turns on a single encounter in 1997: John Josana, a black South African-born British journalist, finds himself opposite Marius Muller, a white Afrikaner who fought in the Angolan border war, and the conversation that follows stretches across three decades of guilt, anger and the open question of whether forgiveness is possible at all.

What do we know about the play, its makers and its run?

Written by Herzberg and directed by Jake Murray, The Moth is presented by Elysium Theatre Company and Andy Jordan Productions with the Finborough. Faz Singhateh plays John Josana; Micky Cochrane plays Marius Muller; and Adjoa Andoh, of Bridgerton, provides the voice of John’s mother, Joy. The London season runs 27 October to 21 November, with evening performances Tuesday to Saturday and post-show discussions on 5, 12 and 19 November.

Herzberg, born in 1953, began acting at The Space, South Africa’s first multi-racial theatre, before coming to Britain in 1976. He played Shimon Peres in Oslo at the National Theatre and in the West End. The Moth began as a ten-minute video monologue commissioned by Elysium during the Covid-19 pandemic; watched more than 30,000 times online, selected for 26 festivals, and winner of the Best Monologue award at the Kwanzaa Film Festival in New York. Herzberg then spent five years expanding it into a full-length stage play. The stage version toured the north of England in 2025, playing to packed houses in Newcastle, Salford and Liverpool, in about 40 performances; Cochrane won Best Performance at the North-East Culture Theatre Awards. The script has been published by Bloomsbury. It is his third return to the border-war theme; his earlier play The Dead Wait (2002) followed a conscript ordered to carry a wounded freedom fighter to the border.

What is still unresolved about the play and the war it depicts?

Whether the four nominations become awards, and whether the production transfers after the Finborough run closes, is not yet known. Herzberg says there has already been interest from the United States, and he hopes the published script will lead to further productions internationally; but nothing has been announced. A second unknown sits inside the play: Herzberg says the story grew from an anecdote told by an Angolan war veteran, yet the veteran has not been named publicly, so the line between testimony and invention cannot be traced from the outside. A third concerns the history itself: Herzberg says very little has emerged about the details of the border war, at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission or elsewhere, because conscripts signed documents swearing them to secrecy. The full record of that war, in other words, is still partly closed.

Why does a small London play about a fifty-year-old war matter now?

Because the war it depicts was designed to be forgotten. South Africa’s intervention in Angola was conducted under extreme secrecy, and the men who fought it were ordered to stay silent. Many on both sides have lived ever since with post-traumatic stress; Herzberg himself was left with tinnitus and a lasting sensitivity to sudden noise. A play that puts two of those lives in one railway carriage for two hours does what official history has not: it lets the cost of a hidden war be heard in full. The director, Jake Murray, says the play engages with a present in which racism is again being legitimised by politicians, a claim its post-show discussions, which bring psychologists, politicians and journalists on stage, are built to test. The questions at its heart, who has the right to forgive, and whether forgiveness has meaning after a war crime; are not confined to one war: they recur wherever societies live with what their armies did, from the hospital wards of Ethiopia’s renewed fighting to the burial of unidentified soldiers from the Iran–Iraq war. The Red Cross now counts 130 armed conflicts worldwide, the highest number since the Second World War; the play’s subject is less a closed chapter than a standing condition. The same unresolved questions run through South Africa’s present, including who pays for the industrial legacy of the apartheid era.

Why has the same play earned both raves and two stars?

The critical record of The Moth is unusually divided; and the division is itself the most interesting fact about the production. On one side, reviewers have called it powerful, visceral and important: one gave it four-and-a-half stars, another 80 per cent, and the Daily Maverick’s Battersby called it “a riveting psychological thriller with memorable performances and clear messages for humanity”. The praise concentrates on the two performances, Singhateh’s gravity as Josana, Cochrane’s capture of Marius’s pain, entitlement and victimhood, and on the moral weight of questions the play refuses to settle. On the other side, three London outlets gave it two stars, and others called it stodgy, preachy and overwritten. The recurring charge is structural: a taut ten-minute monologue, stretched across two hours, becomes a succession of speeches, with the same points repeated until the audience feels lectured rather than engaged. Herzberg says the response has been like nothing he has ever known, “on the one hand, euphoric with rave reviews and the four nominations and, on the other, with one or two early reviews, aggressively critical”, and that he always knew the play would have an effect, without knowing it would be this polarising. The split reveals a fault line in how theatre is judged: whether a play about history should dramatise its questions or argue them, and whether moral urgency excuses a text that tells its audience how to feel. What nobody disputes is that the production has forced that argument into the open, night after night, in a fifty-seat room.

What could this production set in motion beyond its four-week run?

The most concrete consequence is already in print: the Bloomsbury script means other companies can stage it, and Herzberg says there has already been contact from the United States. If the nominations turn into wins, a transfer, to a larger London house or a further tour, becomes considerably more likely, and the producers have made no secret of their ambitions for a wider audience. A second consequence is quieter: the post-show discussions, which Herzberg says reveal “an incredible hunger of audiences to engage with the material”, suggest a model in which a play about a contested past becomes a forum rather than a finished statement. A third runs deeper: every revival of the border-war story adds pressure on a historical record that has stayed thin for fifty years; veterans speaking, audiences asking, a new generation encountering a war their parents were ordered not to discuss. Whether that pressure produces new testimony, new research or simply more theatre is the open question the production leaves behind.

What should we watch in the final week?

Three dates matter. The first is Thursday 19 November, when the final post-show discussion brings the creative team together with Allan Leas, a playwright and human rights advocate, and Kevin Laue, a South African war resister and founder of the Committee on South African War Resistance; two men who lived the play’s questions about refusal and forgiveness. The second is Saturday 21 November, the closing night: does the run end with a transfer announcement or a quiet farewell? The third is the Fringe Theatre Awards, where the production’s four nominations will be decided. Beyond London, the signal is the script: Bloomsbury’s text is now available to companies anywhere, and a first production beyond Britain would show whether a story rooted in one country’s secret war can travel as a universal argument about memory.