STUDENTS ARE REVOLTING and values are topsy turvy in a world where the pendulum swings with alacrity and everything is shifting as it must. Mike van Graan’s new play, The Good White, takes on these issues with characteristic forthrightness, and you’ll be at turns cringing and being jubilant in your chair, depending on your age and experience of being in this world. The work’s season at the Barney Simon Theatre, in the Market Theatre complex, has been extended until 8 June 2025.

And yes, the inflammatory nature of a title like The Good White has as much dynamite and pull as that of Bad Jews, which was staged in South Africa just over a decade ago, raising all those demons of political correctness, good and bad, as it must, just by the utterance of its headline. Clearly, in writing it, Van Graan has had his fair share of fun with punning and double entendre, which resonates with skin colour, value systems and good intentions over immediate passions and a will to overthrow the perceived bad guy.

It is here, in a set which conjures up the university-like feel of a foyer, a little tawdry at the edges, evocative of the kind of speckled marble faux colonial construction that could be all universities and none, where we meet Prof Simon Whitehead (Russel Savadier). He’s gone through the system and knows the rhetoric well. The plot twists around all the levels of possibility. Whitehead’s lover is Dr Angela Witten (Renate Stuurman) a so-called Coloured associate professor on the edge of promotion. He’s raised Noluthando Kakaza (Shonisani Masuthu), the child of his former domestic, and she’s grown into an earnest, humourless student firebrand, who takes no prisoners in political rhetoric. His running buddy is Zimbabwean prof Emmanuel Kabwato (Vusi Kunene) who has just written a book on decolonisation. And the moment is ripe for the launch of this book, which will feature a bit of a speech and a spot of inflammatory performance poetry.

The bits and pieces are in place for an explosive denouement. Add a bit of protest performance, the demon of gender-based violence, and some shenanigans in the wrong bedroom, and you get the picture: It’s a scenario tense with energy and brittle with distrust. Savadier commands his role with authority and world-weariness that are completely relatable.

Effectively, hinging on the 2016 #FeesMustFall student protests, this is a period piece, but one with the kind of teeth that will have relevance to students of South African history in years to come.

The characters are painted in bold. They’re two-dimensional stereotypes with every conceivable bit of South African cliché popped into the story’s interstices. It’s about how Whitehead has navigated his humanity to confront the system, flawed and broken with betrayals and the mawkishness of angry youth, as it must be. It’s about the danger of the recorded word and many a slip made twixt context and the ears of a mixed audience. And it is about how language becomes loaded irrevocably, implacably, from generation to generation, as political correctness holds sway and shape-shifts.

Either way, if you’re a South African with a sense of belonging to this knotty and miasmic existence, which shifts and turns whichever way you look, this is a play to watch. Something to dominate dinner party repartee for a while.

The Good White is written by Mike van Graan and directed by Greg Homann. Performed by Vusi Kunene, Shonisani Masutha, Russel Savadier and Renate Stuurman, it features design by Patrick Curtis (set);  Nadia Kruger (costumes); and Themba Stewart (lighting). It is onstage at the Barney Simon Theatre, Market Theatre complex in Newtown Johannesburg, until 8 June 2025.