3 – 11 OKT 2026
3 – 11 OKT 2026
Produksie: The Second Coming and Wonder in Woorde/Words
Deur: Steyn du Toit
Foto’s: Nardus Engelbrecht
Catching Matthew Gray these days means catching him in transit. I met him backstage at the HMS Bloemhof school hall, already in costume, after a full day of broadcasting and festival admin. That fits a performer whose work spans stage, screen, radio and the MC’s microphone. This week, the focus is on two productions that grew out of the Stellenbosch University Drama Department.
The first, The Second Coming, started as the final performance creation piece of his undergraduate degree in Drama and Theatre Studies. “It’s basically a culmination of everything we’ve learned,” he explains. “The purpose of it is to create a performance with a group completely on your own.”
The group of seven first wrote a script and then took it to the floor, with Kimi de Beer and Mateo Komlosy as writers and Dr André Gerber as facilitator. The breakthrough came with a central conflict. Pope Innocence decrees that the church door must never be opened. Then a young woman, Ru, comes knocking. “His flaw is lust. He wants a young lady in the congregation with them. Therefore he opens the door, and Ru starts spiralling the whole thing out of control. That’s where the engine came into play.”
His virtue is that he’s exceptionally empathetic,” Matthew says. “He understands the way that people do things for their own gain or to attain power. He just doesn’t say anything, because it’s entertaining for him. He enjoys watching people destroy themselves.
Matthew’s own character, Ted Kowalski, was inspired by Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber. Ted is self-destructive and longs for an ending that never comes. He sits in a wheelchair on stage before the audience enters and is still there when the lights go out. “His virtue is that he’s exceptionally empathetic,” Matthew says. “He understands the way that people do things for their own gain or to attain power. He just doesn’t say anything, because it’s entertaining for him. He enjoys watching people destroy themselves.”
That wheelchair also solved a practical problem for a man co-directing a play he never leaves. “I would just leave the wheelchair on stage, step out and watch us play,” he explains. The cast delivered their lines to the empty chair, “meaning I was always in two places at once”. Kimi, who acts in some scenes but not others, directed the ones she isn’t in.
Although the play is in English, Afrikaans has its place. Kimi plays Susana Magdalena, a staunch Afrikaner who drops in the odd Afrikaans word. Her intended husband, Richard Dambuza, is just as emphatically Xhosa. They never make it to the altar and end up killing each other. “No one’s safe. We take the mickey out of everyone, including Afrikaans tannies,” Matthew says. “It adds to the universality of it.”
Matthew and Kimi share the directing credit, with Taylor Ackermann on design and Kgahlisho Matloga and Lutho Ndyalvane leading warm-ups. Still, he insists on the collective. “You can slap titles on us, put placards on us, whatever, but it’s a group effort at the end of the day.”
The play is set in Revelation and follows the last six people on earth as they try to start a “church of the purged world”. “Those that are in power become corrupt, and those that impeach them unfortunately take the same positions and become as corrupt as they were,” he says. “It’s a comment on human nature.”
Bringing raptures, demons and seven-headed dragons to an Afrikaans festival stage made the group “hyper-aware”, but they committed fully. “Theatre is daunting, daring and dangerous, so one should always be a little bit on edge,” he says. “If you shy away from it, it tends to bite you back. But if you really go all the way, it’s surprising how softly it lands.”
For the Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees, the writers added a confrontation between Pope Innocence and the character Ashley to build towards her sacrifice. Heila Hugo joined as stage manager, and the company added more blood. It worked. “When that first death scene happened, the gasp was huge,” he says. “I had to stop myself from smiling in the wheelchair.” The group now hopes to take the production to the KKNK in Oudtshoorn.
Child-like is what we use when we play like children, but childish is when it has a little bit of immaturity to it. That’s what we wanted to try and lose.
Wonder in Woorde/Words came from a very different place: Matthew’s Honours year in Voice and Speech, a specialisation Stellenbosch University has reintroduced for the first time since 2019. He very nearly chose cabaret instead. With that application filled out and his finger hovering over the submit button, he phoned his parents. “I said, ‘My passion lies with communication. It’s the sound of the voice, it’s using yourself to express yourself through your voice.’” A childhood knack for accents and storytelling settled it.
“It’s been a very experimental year,” he says. “That is the nature of Wonder.” Under applied theatre practitioner Amelda Brand, six students devised a children’s work from material compiled by Mareli Hattingh Pretorius. The aim was to engage young audiences without talking down to them. “Child-like is what we use when we play like children, but childish is when it has a little bit of immaturity to it. That’s what we wanted to try and lose.”
The production moves between Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa, and that is where the voice training came in. “I’m English first-speaking. I can speak Afrikaans, well, I’d like to think, and isiXhosa is a stretch for me. I speak better isiZulu than I do isiXhosa,” he admits. “Your mouth moves in a way that you’re not used to, and your breath is used very differently.” His castmate Lihle Ngcawe, a first-language isiXhosa speaker, faced the same challenge in reverse. “It’s all about adapting.”
His favourite moment is a nightmare sequence of scary stories. As the actors tell a tale around a campfire, including a poem about an aggressive cat, Amy Olivier and Lea Steenkamp bring it to life with crates behind them. “We speak the story, they show the story.” The monsters attack, the performers fall asleep, and they wake to the Afro house track “Vuka” for a dance number. In a solo diary entry delivered in a broad Durban accent, Matthew blames a falling book for his muddled thinking. “Everyone always loves it.”
At Woordfees, the first audience was invested but reserved. “We could feel they were with us, but they weren’t laughing, they weren’t gasping. The second audience erupted. They were loud, cheering, laughing, gasping, screaming and talking back to us.”
After the production’s run at the Suidoosterfees, Woordfees festival director Saartjie Botha invited it onto the children’s programme. “We were like, ‘Hell yeah, let’s get in there. This will be fun.’” Alongside Matthew, the cast includes Torden van Rensburg, Aidan Davies, Lea Steenkamp, Amy Olivier and Lihle Ngcawe.
Next up is Poppycock, an idea that began in his first year among his circle of drama friends. “We were teasing the idea of what if we did a play that was just the boys?” With none of them speaking Afrikaans as a first language, it felt like a pipe dream. After a false start at a State Theatre talent platform, Gerber suggested an all-boys cabaret for the Première Festival. The result is a sketch comedy about straight Gen Z masculinity in South Africa, and it won Best Ensemble. The title came from looking up synonyms for “nonsense”, with a cheeky double meaning the boys couldn’t resist.
It opens with the cast fooling about in a changing room to “Careless Whisper”, a sign that nothing is off-limits. “Audiences can expect to be shocked, to laugh, to see themselves and to get angry, curious or empathetic,” he says.
In 2027, Matthew plans to stay in Stellenbosch, presenting, MCing and auditioning while touring his work. The aim is to keep Poppycock, The Second Coming and Carrion Communion alive in Cape Town theatres and at festivals such as the KKNK, the Suidoosterfees and the National Arts Festival. Above all, he wants to take them home to KwaZulu-Natal. “A big goal of mine next year is to go to the Hilton Arts Festival, hopefully with all three productions.”
After that comes what he calls a “hard reset”: travel, new people, new experiences. “I believe there’s a lot to learn in just doing.”
Whatever the stage, his compass stays the same. “My mission is to entertain, to motivate and to inspire. If I can do just one of those three things every single time I do something, I know I’m on the right track.”
Matthew Gray presents AM2PM on MFM 92.6 on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 09:00 to 12:00.
