Interview with director Jake Murray of Elysium Theatre
Director Jake Murray of Elysium Theatre sat down with Lucy Smith to discuss the upcoming production of The Moth at the Finborough Theatre. Read their fascinating discussion below:
Of course, trauma, and the legacy of conflict, is crucial in the play. It feels as if trauma and the legacy of violence constantly reinvents itself, appearing in different forms and triggers across the different characters. How is this shifting of trauma presented, and how does it come across to the audience?
Trauma effects everyone. When we first produced the show in the North East one audience member said ‘This play is not about Apartheid or racism, its about the human condition’. Both John and Marius are traumatised by the legacy of Apartheid, Marius by how he was brutalised by his own people and John by how he lost his family and home and was forced to grow up in exile. Marius knows he is traumatised but John doesn’t: he’s turned his trauma into strength. The two men’s struggle to come to terms with their past and move forward into a more healed future is rooted in historical circumstances but has universal resonance. We can all see ourselves in both of them.
At the same time the extremity of what they have been traumatised by: wars, racism in its institutional/ political as well as personal forms, bereavement, alienation from family, these are being writ large all over the world. The play has vital things to say about how we confront these traumas on a global as well as an individual level. Few plays written now have the ambition to do that or provide that catharsis.
John’s writing of Marius’s story sparks the confrontation and conversation of revealing their story to the world. Does a similar purpose come of the play itself? How does the performance of the play confront the audience and spark conversations of conflict and the legacy of the Apartheid?
South African Apartheid has been the key reference point for all our discussions about race, racial inequality and injustice, colonialism, imperialism and war. Its legacy is all around us, we use it in our discourse every day, and yet as John says, most people don’t know what South African Apartheid was or how it manifested. ‘The Moth’ confronts that, but also takes the actuality of Apartheid as a metaphor or prism with which to see our modern world. Its not about then, its about now.
As John also says, “Apartheid is over in name and law, but the idea behind it, the willingness, the fear, the madness, that hasn’t gone”. ‘The Moth’ confronts us with that reality and asks us to look not just at Apartheid in the past but the many Apartheids we exist with in the present, ones we perpetuate without knowing, as well as the Apartheids in our own hearts.
Following this, The Moth confronts the audience with extremely gritty, provocative themes. Why is this important? Especially in the context of our cultural climate, why is the confrontation and the conversation sparked by the play important?
Our country, the UK, has been spared the kind of violence, trauma and oppression that John and Marius have experienced, but we have very strong opinions about all of them. Every day we debate them loudly and angrily online and in person, filling our streets with demonstration. The danger is, however, that because so many of our opinions are not derived from direct lived experience but ideology, those opinions become theoretical only.
‘The Moth’ is written by someone who has had direct experience of these issues when they are existential rather than theoretical. Its not there to comfort you, congratulate you or tell you what you already know, its there to shake you up. Whether you are Left or Right it forces you to confront what you think about things, make you reconsider what think you know and what you don’t. Its there to challenge you and make you grow, and in our often complacent times that’s vitally important.
Bouncing off John’s line: ‘Don’t ask me to forgive you. I can never do that.’ Forgiveness, and the lack of, is crucial in John’s characterisation and his actions. What role does forgiveness play in the dynamic between the characters – despite the tentative understanding that develops, how far does their forgiveness reach?
Forgiveness is one part of the many powerful themes ‘The Moth’ engages with. Marius never formally asks for John’s forgiveness, but he does constantly seek some kind of closure, recognition, understanding or even acceptance through him. Once he has met John and the two have confronted each other Marius sees his redemption as being bound up in the other man. John can’t or won’t give it to him, but Marius doesn’t stop coming. The play asks big questions about whether any of this, forgiveness, redemption, whatever you want to call it, is possible, what it means, how it relates to responsibility and what value it has when the worst crimes have been committed. As with all great plays it doesn’t provide answers, but puts the questions in such a way that you feel you have to find your own.
Why did you choose to bring The Moth back? Both as a theatre company and as a director, why did you choose to expand its reach further into London, and what importance does it have to you that you chose to direct it again?
Paul wrote the original monologue during Covid in 2020 in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. Since then we have had the invasion of Ukraine, October 7 and the war in Gaza, the election of Trump, the Far Right riots of 2024 and the accelerating splintering of our society into increasingly polarised sectarian factions. We’ve had the Iran War and a growing threat of a wider war in Europe.
During all that Paul completed the stage version in 2024 and we performed it to great acclaim across the North in 2025. Every day its confrontation of the issues all these events have thrown up and its call for a universal humanity get more and more urgent and relevant. Why not bring it to London, the centre of all the debates raging in our country? ‘The Moth’ deserves a greater audience and we can’t wait to see how London reacts to it.
Can you outline the importance the show has to you, and some of the key impacts you have taken away from it?
‘The Moth’ is one of the shows I am proudest to have done. I’m an old-fashioned humanist. I do believe there is a universal humanity and a better world to fight for. We live in a time when hate is back in fashion, when dividing lines of race, religion, nation and class are being drawn again and war violence are becoming celebrated as valid political acts. Paul’s play is a rallying cry for anyone willing to stand against that. Hatred and killing cannot be our future. ‘The Moth’ shows where that leads and warns us against it. It is a refusal to surrender.
The Moth runs at the Finborough Theatre from 27 Oct – 21 Nov 2026. Presented by Andy Jordan Productions and Elysium Theatre Company in association with Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre. Buy your tickets from the Finborough website.
