The Moon Looks Delicious From Here, written and performed by Aldo Brincat, received accolades at the 50th National Arts Festival in Makhanda (2024), winning a Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award, and at the Bitesize Theatre Festival in London (2024) a Special Jury Award. The 70-minute solo stage production is largely autobiographical and follows the experience of a first-generation South African — Brincat has Mauritian, Egyptian and Maltese heritage — growing up during apartheid. The story focuses on a father-son relationship set against the backdrop of South Africa’s social and political changes in the 70s and 80s. Brincat portrays multiple characters connected to a single nuclear family navigating issues of identity, migration, religion, sexuality and political change. The performance explores how family dynamics are affected by politics, particularly those of apartheid.
The play is described as largely autobiographical — how did it feel turning memories and family history into a public performance?
The play is autobiographical, but parts are left to poetic licence. The process of writing was easy — it seemed to write itself. I asked myself whether it was OK for me to say the things I was saying: putting words into the mouths of my family members no longer alive. In the end, I felt I represented my family in an accurate way. Their flaws and failings, hopes and dreams, are those of all of us.
You portray a wide range of characters in this solo piece. How did you differentiate each voice on stage, within an emotionally charged narrative?
This is the work of the actor. Playing my father and mother is profound. In a sense, I channel them. I often feel they're with me on stage. During each performance I'm yanked forward from memory to memory. Even now, after it's about 60th performance, I come offstage emotionally wrecked but content, satisfied.
The father-son relationship is central to the story. What aspects of that bond did you want audiences to understand?
I want the audience to understand that our parents did their best for us while negotiating their own traumas, hopes and dreams. I address issues about which I don't know how my father felt — hence the poetic licence. Likewise, with my own children, (now adults), they exist with pieces of me in their memories, which will play on long after I am gone. These fragments of memory will shape how they move through the world.
With themes like heritage, identity, and sexuality, how does your multicultural background shape the storytelling in the play?
My parents were from other countries, and were fleeing their own horrors, arriving in South Africa hoping for a better life. They tried to build a life for themselves against the backdrop of escalating apartheid. I enter, one foot as a first-generation South African and the other as a foreigner. My unique heritage was difficult to negotiate as a child, as was my peculiar name, and my looks. I was also in battle with my own sexuality — which was not spoken of back in those days.
How did the political context of the 70s and 80s influence the dramatic arc of the play?
That's the most profound part of my play. We were all trying to figure out how to be in a South Africa moving swiftly towards white supremacy and uber-fascism. Our lives as a nuclear family were being dashed against the rocks of growing inhumanity and oppression. But then South Africa moved towards democracy — some of my family were there to embrace that, others who wanted to witness that transition missed it by months. I spent my first 30 years under apartheid. Now, under the last 30 years of democracy, I can reflect on the lasting trauma of apartheid.
The play has won international recognition, including awards in SA and London. How has the audience response differed across cultural or geographic contexts?
The world is made by migration. Everywhere I perform, after each performance, there are people who linger after the bulk of the audience have left. They want to talk. They're brimming with stories of how they got to be in their part of the world, living the life that's opened for them. It’s always a profound encounter which I relish. When I performed in London, I was met with stories of how the horrors of apartheid South Africa were received back then. . That's an element that makes my play profound — it strikes a chord in us, it tugs at our raw humanity and how we negotiate the absurdity of politics, relationships and chance.
The title, The Moon Looks Delicious From Here, is evocative and poetic. Why is it called that?
The moon is one of those things that every living being observes. The Moon, like the Sun, has always been there for all to ponder. I'm intrigued by my ancestry coming from aabout the same longitude. I remember when, while studying theatre in Paris as a young man, I'd speak to my mother in Durban on a landline and there were times we'd both look up at the moon, yet were separated by thousands of kilometres. This experience is a modern phenomena. The title refers to deep connections that bind us, no matter what our lived experiences are.
The Moon Looks Delicious From Here is on at the Market Theatre in Joburg until July 27.
