| What: Meeting Murphy, by Gavin Werner, performed by Brent Palmer and Chris Van Rensburg Meeting Murphy is being staged concurrently with Gavin Werner’s Spanish Steps at the Masque, Cape Town. Spanish Steps is performed by Werner and Dianne Simpson When: April 8-18, 2026 Where: The Masque, 37 Main Rd, Muizenberg, Cape Town Bookings: Quicket Tickets: R180 per show, R300 to see both shows on the same evening |
Wonderful to be at the Masque Theatre, April 9 to see Meeting Murphy, the new play by Gavin Werner, starring Brent Palmer and Chris Van Rensburg. The play is running concurrently with Werner’s acclaimed, Spanish Steps, starring Werner and Dianne Simpson. Both plays are on until April 18, 2026. Two excellent plays to catch as a double bill or separately. R180 per show, R300 to see both shows on the same evening
Meeting Murphy is an intriguing play. Superb script, uncomfortable, confrontational, traumatic but darkly funny. Forgiveness and retribution are very much at the crux of this story but so is accountability. That is not a simple construct. Memory and the passage of time – tends to fudge and blur lines between perpetrator and victim. Who the eff are we really? It leads to comic moments of mistaken identities but it is not so funny as you will see, as the protagonists deal with their shared trauma and fallible memories.
In Meeting Murphy, Rick (Chris Van Rensburg) stumbles upon Dave Murphy (Brent Palmer), while on a hike. Dave has been injured. There is no mobile phone reception. It is up to Rick to go and get help for Dave who is agony and cannot move. Plot spoiler alert – Dave bullied Rick when they were both at the same boy’s only school. And now, on a ledge in beautiful Cape Town – it is time for a reckoning as they confront their younger selves.
And therein is memory – and how they remember and WHAT they remember. It is an unplanned reunion in the outdoors. It is not like in the supermarket, where one connects fleetingly with an individual from years back and one says – “well lovely to see you – let’s connect on Facebook and Instagram.” And that’s it. Werner deftly ramps up the narrative into a mesmerising psychological thriller. We the audience try to figure out and fathom what had occurred; what and how the fragments are recalled by the protagonists and how this will all be resolved – if it can. The protagonists themselves are trying to figure it out. Werner presents an unflinching gaze on these two men, caught between one might say, a rock and a hard place, with violence and brutality leitmotifs of their story.
The narrative left me mulling over a lot of questions. For instance, what about redemption? What about revenge and what you imagine you would do in a moment of confrontation with someone from your past? I am not going to spoil how it ends. Perhaps, it can get to be too late to apologise.
Werner’s writing is clever, witty and he smacks the protagonists around – physically and emotionally as they consider each other. Brent Palmer brings a terrific mirthful vulnerability to the menacing Murphy. Chris Van Rensburg’s Rick is a nerd, an archetype nebbish, until he is not. Terrific energy between the actors, bound and tethered by the ties that connect them. They are not predictable peeps, with the simmering rage of Palmer’s Murphy and the increasingly seething of van Rensburg’s Rick as he prowls around the injured Murphy. Will Rick “save” Murphy? Can I say that I enjoyed watching this discomfiting play? I enjoyed watching the protagonists squirm under each other’s gaze, as they rake up the past.
In writing Meeting Murphy, Werner has drawn from his own experiences of being bullied at an all boy’s boarding school, about male toxicity and his complex relationship with his father and how as an adult, he has calibrated what it has meant to him as an individual. See interview with TheCapeRobyn. https://thecaperobyn.co.za/interview-gavin-werner-in-conversation-meeting-murphy-and-spanish-steps/
And what about when the bullied, the victim, becomes a perpetrator, bullying others? This is a key scene in Meeting Murphy, with a so-called prank. After the performance I chatted to Werner about also being a bully, a perpetrator of a “prank”. Yes, he is drawing again from his own experience, or rather as recalled by a friend [of Werner’s]. The friend called Werner out for his [Werner’s] bullying or “prank”. Only, thing is that Werner can’t recall being the instigator of the prank. Interesting – what we remember and don’t recall. Can you be accountable and own up, if you can’t recall what others remember and has clearly caused them terrible pain? “Memory fades. The scars don’t”, as Werner has put it. Yes, and within that proposition, memory is fallible, imperfect, unreliable, which is potently conveyed in this play. It is a minefield to navigate, with all those involved, carrying the weight, the vestiges of the trauma. Is forgiveness overrated?
I would like to see the staging developed, to reflect the nuances and complexities of this play. It isn’t easy to stage two plays in the same space – strike one down – and put up the next in a half an hour. There are budgetary constraints. Hopefully Meeting Murphy can be staged in a smaller space, with tweaks to the staging.
Take your teenagers to see Meeting Murphy. Schools should bring the play to their learners and invite talk back sessions – about bullying – perpetrators and victims – about masculinity – about being a “man” – about trauma and how we can try and deal with it in the safe space of theatre and strive to be decent and kind humans.
❇ Featured image: Chris Van Rensburg and Brent Palmer in Meeting Murphy by Gavin Werner. Photo: James Hagan. Supplied.
