HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Mike van Graan’s The Good White doesn’t shout. It doesn’t need to. It’s a quiet, unnervingly sharp scalpel slicing through the tender tissue of privilege, protest, and post-apartheid identity. And in its calm precision lies its real power.
Set against the lingering echoes of the #FeesMustFall movement, the play does something rare: it resists the temptation to simplify. Instead, it dives headfirst into the murky, uncomfortable waters where good intentions meet historical baggage, and where the personal and political blur into something messy, painful, and real.
The cast is tight, with every performance finely tuned. Each character brings a different lens on race, class, and complicity—and you’ll find yourself shifting your sympathies more than once. There are no easy heroes here, no convenient villains. Just people trying (and often failing) to navigate a world built on inequality.
As someone who moved here from Britain just six years ago—someone who didn’t grow up with apartheid’s long shadow or live through the student uprisings—I found the play especially resonant. It doesn’t lecture. It doesn’t gatekeep history. It invites you in, then gently (and sometimes not so gently) asks: where do you stand? What are you willing to unlearn?
And perhaps most impressively, it does all this with subtlety. There are no melodramatic monologues, no preachy punchlines. Just moments—quiet, explosive, human—that linger long after the lights go down.
In a time when nuance often gets bulldozed by outrage, The Good White is a brave, intelligent piece of theatre. It doesn’t try to solve the past. It just asks you to feel it. And for anyone—especially those of us still figuring out how to be here without pretending to know it all—that’s more than enough.
