THE SKILL YOU need to tell your own story to crowds of potentially hostile strangers is incredibly complex. You need context. And empathy. A smattering of humour never goes amiss. And then there is your ability to switch between characters and timeframes with the dexterity of a ballet dancer, so that the story leaps in directions which are universal without being silly, and evade pettiness as they embrace largeness. Not to mention the time frame. You’ve got maybe 90 minutes to tell a whole life. Aldo Brincat’s The Moon Looks Delicious from Here, which has at last reached Johannesburg stages, after several detours into London and elsewhere, is a major triumph, on every level. It performs at the Barney Simon Theatre, Market Theatre until 27 July 2025.

Like the storytelling in writing by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – or the narrative magicked into life by Tony Miyambo in his Cenotaph of Dan wa Moriri, the story is not linear. In fact, it takes some moments of careful listening to understand who the characters, Mario and Marie, are, at the outset. There are powerful nuggets of difficult fact cast among a terrain of apparent whimsy with the sleight of hand tricks that bring Chinese linking rings into the mix.

And the nuances of accent take you between Second World War Spain, Malta of the 1950s, Alexandria in Egypt from before then, and Durban in South Africa, thereafter. Your ear needs to be quick and careful as you follow the intricate paths established by Brincat. It’s about love and madness, loss and integrity. It’s also about taboo and lust and strange things that the body can do when you’re 12, to make things even more confusing for you.

The Moon is a beautiful and universal piece, written in simple language with a deft hand and clearly over a great many years of emotions spent and ideas thought and revisited, sometimes in great pain. It evokes some of the texture in works such as Jon Keevy’s A Girl Called Owl or Sophie Joans’s ÎIe. If you lived through some of the horrors of apartheid, there are passages here that will plummet your memories with almost physical pain. If you lived through the messiness of your own adolescence, if you understood the value of friendship, if you saw things in your friends before they were aware of them, themselves, this is a play you will adore. It’s a touchstone work and a clear victory in storytelling.

Brincat’s presence onstage is luminous. Not through any tricks of technology or bells and whistles of any other kind. His pauses hold you. His hesitations, speaking in the voice of a very young boy, or of a grown son supporting an elderly mother with dementia, will snatch at your own sense of humanity.

The play is nothing short of brilliant, but a theatre experience is contained within the machine of the theatre itself, and if the lighting operator sneezes and makes noises in the space behind the seating; and if the ticket machines in the theatre’s parking are broken, something is disrupted in the beauty you have been privileged to see.

The Moon Looks Delicious from Here is directed by Sjaka Septembir assisted by Caroline Esterhuizen. Written and performed by Aldo Brincat, it features music by Bongeziwe Mabandla and is onstage at the Barney Simon Theatre, Market Theatre complex in Newtown, Johannesburg, until 27 July 2025.