All the world her stage: A scripted encounter with MoMo Matsunyane

A play she wrote and directed swept five Naledi Awards - Best Director, Best Production, Best Original Score, Best Supporting Actress, Best Male Lead - after twelve nominations. Another she directed sold out a season, then extended, at the Market Theatre.

Other stages followed: Durban’s Playhouse, Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre. She helmed a trilogy of her own plays, including a one-woman work she performed herself, alongside the launch of her debut published collection. She served as impresario, writer, and performer at Season 11 of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

She directed Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs at Schauspielhaus in Graz, Austria. She appeared on screens too, starring in Levels on Mzansi Magic. All of this, in one calendar year. 2025.

In the theatre of a person’s life, some stories insist on being told in the language that shaped them.

To profile this life through ordinary reportage felt inadequate, as if trying to describe music with only a list of instruments.

The only honest approach was to step onto her stage with only but a single page of her life, to step into the architecture of her pauses, the choreography of her silences, the flutter of her voice, and the wings she has learned to enter and exit.

 What follows unfolds as a play-scripted encounter: a conversation that listens as deeply as it speaks, between myself and the multi-award-winning, 2023 Standard Bank Young Artist for Theatre, MoMo Matsunyane.

SET DESCRIPTION (Minimal Two-Hander Stage)

Stage-left: A writing desk with a single open laptop.

Stage-right: One bar stool.

Upstage centre: A coat stand holding a green leotard.
Downstage floor: An old CD player (unused, unplugged, present, silent, a witness).

Backdrop: Neutral, dark, uncluttered: a stage designed for speech, pause, memory, and motion.

LIGHTING & SOUND NOTES

Lighting style: Soft transitions between washes of cool and warm glow depending on emotional temperature.

Sound: No ambient music. All silence is created through actor pacing, lighting, and pause.

Silence spine: Expressed through pacing and pauses.

ACT I - SCENE 1 (PROLOGUE)

LIGHTS: Dim. A single cool wash isolates Vus’umuzi at desk. The rest of the stage remains shadowed.

VUS’UMUZI (standing slowly, addressing audience)

"Silence stood sentinel before language learned to label its purpose. In the modest, muted mezzanine of moment and musing, a life learned to able its service.

The story of MoMo Matsunyane begins in half-heard hallways of hush and held breath, where morning prayers pressed soft and principled practice set the morsels. It starts in the tender ticking of time, the fragile fellowship of family, the faint friction of fear and fortitude.

Raised where rules reigned, first by a grandmother who guarded education like an oath, her voice was trained by distance and discipline. Loss arrived early, yet taught her timing. What molded her were lessons learned low, losses lived long, a heart that kept beating even when words were weighed and walled in by the world’s watchful order.

MoMo learned how breath can be held hostage, how sound can inhabit an unhealed heart – hovering, hiding behind it – how a voice can learn to hold its balance by a hush it never asked for.

Silence was the harbinger before craft became praxis. It schooled her inhale, steadied her exhale, and taught her how to stay aloft in a room before she ever crossed it.

A voice that once felt small now fills the room without force, without flinch, with a truth that bears the ambrosia of fiction, without begging for the spotlight’s blessing. The plot moves forward in murmurs and meaning, in pauses that stretch tension taut, then let truth talk back with quiet healing.

She stepped into performance halls, audition rooms, film sets, and festivals with an energy that refused to surrender to the ruse of shortcuts, imbalance, or bargaining. When opportunity finally met her, it found her ready, rehearsed by conviction and cast by resolve. The plot is still walking toward you. Lean in. We begin.”

LIGHTS HOLD.

PAUSE.

Vus’umuzi sits back at desk. Laptop closed.

END SCENE.

SCENE 2

LIGHTS: Warm shift to a softer amber wash. MoMo steps into a small pool of light centre-stage.

Vus’umuzi remains visible, seated by the desk, observing.
MoMo (addressing the audience)

“End-of-year energy hits different. The year is wrapping its arms around itself, while everyone stretches theirs, eagerly or reluctantly, towards a silhouette of the approaching year.

(She crosses to the coat stand, fingertips brushing the green leotard. She doesn’t put it on. She lets it sway gently, as if testing the air. She narrates to the audience.)

For me, it’s prep season for the retreat. Ten days of silence and hours of stillness, this is a ritual that you need to kneel into with prep. So, as I was busy packing the world away before it packs me… a Whatsapp text!

(Her voice lifts playfully, briefly airborne, mimicking Vus’umuzi’s voice as if borrowing a current, then releases it.)

‘Capital M.s! What it is?! Mamela, for my first article of 2026, I want to do a feature on you, because, ahmean, 2025 has been the year of MoMo Matsunyane. Please let me know if we can have a Google Meet on Monday morning for an indepth interview.’

And I was like: Yuuurse, let’s do it! Let's clock it! (a chuckle flutters then settles), well, not in those particular words, but uhm… here we are.”

(She walks to the barstool)

VUS’UMUZI (standing, moving from desk, narrating to audience):

“Well, when I was weighing my first piece for this year, I asked myself who in the theatre game did the most in 2025? The answer arrived as the question exhaled: MoMo Matsunyane.

No second-guess. Sometimes the story chooses the stage, sometimes the stage chooses the story, and this time? Both story and stage summoned her.

(He walks once around the desk, a slow circle. His hand lands on the laptop lid, half-closing it, not shut, not open: pause made physical.)

If there’s entropy at year’s end, it abates here.”

(They both sit. He opens his laptop. She steadies her phone.)

BEAT.

VUS’UMUZI

“You there?”

MoMo

“I’m here.”

(They lock eyes.)

LIGHTS FADE.

END SCENE.

SCENE 3

LIGHTS: A fused wash of light settles over both actors: warm and cool tones breathing together in a quiet coexistence.

During MoMo’s longer reflections, the wash may soften, giving the room permission to listen. Transitions feel like thought turning, a scene inhaling before it continues.

VUS’UMUZI
“DiMoMza!”

MoMo
“Whazzuuup!”

VUS’UMUZI
“Istaring, injayeGame, IsMoMondiya!”

MoMo
“Sibaba ukudlula ichilisi yamandiya!” (She laughs, breaking the air, her laughter then circles back to her.)

VUS’UMUZI
(laughing along) “What it is?”

MoMo
“Uhm, I’m good hey, just preparing to go down to this meditation retreat I go to every year.”

VUS’UMUZI
“Halala wenah! The custodians of life! Going to ‘meditation retreats’ while others go to groove? Halala!”

MoMo
(A chuckle stalls mid-air, then steadies.) “Mamela! Ke anxious nyana jwang, but also excited. I leave early tomorrow, and then we start on Wednesday, and from there it’s 10 days of silence.” (She smiles. A soft wingbeat)

VUS’UMUZI
“Wait, so for a whole ten days… you’re just gonna be quiet?”

MoMo
“Yeah, it’s a silent retreat. And we’ll be meditating for 14-18 hours a day.”

VUS’UMUZI
“Wow! Where and how much is this?”

MoMo
“It’s in Worcester. About an hour away from Cape Town. It’s free, you just have to get yourself there. It functions off something called Dana, which is basically whatever you can give at the end of the course.”

VUS’UMUZI
“And then… what do you eat, just silence and breath for 10 days?”

MoMo
(a dart of laughter changes direction mid-air) “Noo! It’s not like a fast. It’s like a Buddhist monk feast. Nothing is killed, so it’s all veggies, fruit, lentils, salads. It’s all the nice stuff. (Pause) It’s one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my life. (Pause) This thing.

(Pause)

I went when I was really fighting for a way out of my own mental cage, you know? And I have never looked back since. This is my fourth time going. I try go every year. And then I spend a week in Cape Town to just kind of debrief from the whole thing because it’s very overwhelming. (Pause) It’s been a great help, man.

(Pause) It’s been a great help.”

BEAT: They both hold the pause, eyes meeting again, silence acting as connective tissue.

VUS’UMUZI (Facing the audience)

“And this is when I knew”

VUS’UMUZI (Speaking back to MoMo)

“Alright then. I think… I suppose our interview has already begun. So I need you to take me back, way back? Let’s start with your earliest, happiest memory. As far back as you can remember. The furthest as your memories can stretch. When you were the happiest.”

MOMO
“Oh my gosh! (Swoons) Earliest happiest memory?!” (She walks off the barstool towards the audience, pacing as if thinking in excitement)

BEAT.
END SCENE

SCENE 4

LIGHTS: A soft remembering light arrives as a glow that feels like a memory surfacing. The stage shifts subtly, as if silence itself has leaned closer to listen. The world quiets, making room for origin.

STAGE NOTE: This scene lives in recollection. Movements are unhurried. Silence cushions the words. The body remembers before the mouth finishes the sentence. MoMo drifts instinctively toward one side of the stage, leaving the opposite wing unused. From this moment, the choreography of the actors’ movement is entrusted to the reader’s imagination; the stage becomes a shared act of seeing.

MOMO (Facing audience)

“It… it might sound cheesy, but it really was the first time I was on stage. (She glows, and a small stillness finds her)

I remember putting on this green leotard. I was at a place called… so actually, no wait, maybe even before that… maybe even… maybe before that.”

VUS’UMUZI (Facing the laptop)
“Okay, lets maybe start with this, and then we’ll move to the ‘before.’”

MOMO (Facing audience)

“Well, they actually both involve art.
So, I was at Eden College, we were doing a production, and I was playing a flower. I don’t know why the feeling of putting on that green leotard never left me. That was the base for the flower. And then we had flower drawings, cut-outs, around our faces. (Her hands sketch shapes in the air, unconsciously. Memory choreographs the gesture.)

And then seeing my family in the audience… And… I just remember the process of putting on the costume, making me deeply happy.”

VUS’UMUZI (Facing the laptop)
“How old were you then?”

MOMO
“I must have been around five going on six”.

(Beat. She muses. The age lands.)

VUS’UMUZI
“I see. And what then was the ‘before’?”

MOMO
“The before is at Oly’s preschool in Spruitview. Ne ke kena with a cousin of mine, Nobantu… we basically grew up like sisters, you know? We lived in the same area, so we were always together.

We were doing a play on this biblical story where these women are fighting for a baby. And I played the mother who got the baby after saying, ‘No, no, no. Rather she have her.’ after the threat of the baby being split into two. (A small pause: the weight of choice before the child.) Oh, how Nobantu fought me for that role, but I got it. (a naughty guffaw jets through the air), and she played the other mother.”

VUS’UMUZI
“How old are you at this point?”

MOMO
“Four-ish.
And I remember years later making the connection, studying Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle in high-school, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh! I… I… I remember playing this woman at a very young age.”

VUS’UMUZI
“You were already playing lead at four.

”

MOMO
“Come on!
And when I say to people ‘God cast me in the role,’ they think I’m being cocky. God cast me in the role as lead. That’s what I’m here to do.”

VUS’UMUZI
“A lead at four and a flower at six? How did it feel, moving from lead as your first role, then the next one you’re an extra? You were a flower, bro.”

MoMo
(laughs) “So let me tell you, because context is key. There were four flowers. And the entire grade had to perform in school uniforms. Okay? Let’s start there. So already I’m starting out from the front. (laughs) I don’t remember what the story was about, but I remember us singing, and a little choreography, swinging my head side to side. But I didn’t feel like an extra. Because we were the only ones in costume. The story clearly was about these flowers.” (laughs)

VUS’UMUZI
“So you were lead as a flower?”

MoMo
“The leading flower. Yuursssa!” ((her laughter takes a playful, upward swoop, a small bright take-off before perching again)

BEAT: The stage holds the laughter gently. Silence smiles with them.

VUS’UMUZI
“Alrighty then, Ms. Leading Flower. What was your actual lead role after that?”

MoMo
(She searches for the memory before speaking.)

“Mmmh… I was eight.

After Eden, I went to Houghton Primary. They had productions every year. Every single year there was a stage, a script, there was a moment to step into something. In Standard Two, we did Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and I played the narrator, alongside my teacher, Ms. Munday.
(She nods slightly, as if acknowledging the weight of it.)

It was a big role. Like, properly big. You can imagine the responsibility. I was literally holding the story.

(A small smile. Then it fades.) And I remember this one girl, Mahlatse. I used to talk about her a lot… I think I’m over it now. (beat) She told me she didn’t understand why I got the role. She said I couldn’t sing. Said I sounded like a sheep.

(The word lands. She lets it sit.)

And I remember how fast that got inside me. How something that I loved, something that felt so natural, suddenly felt exposed. I started hearing my voice before I could use it; dude, I was doubting it, doubting my own self. That thing changed my relationship with my voice. It always made me feel like I’m not good enough.

(Quietly.)

I started getting scared of singing.
(She exhales.)

VUS’UMUZI
“And it stayed with you?”

MoMo
“For years. (beat) All the way until second year at Wits.
(A breath. A turn.) I was dating this guy at the time, and he suggested I host these sessions called Expressions, with poetry, music, and hip-hop. Just… people showing up and sharing. And because I was hosting, I wasn’t trying to impress anyone, I mean, I was just holding space for my peoples.

And in holding that space… my voice came back. (pause) It just came out. I started singing again. I started writing my own music. I literally just said, ‘MoMo you got this!’

And that’s when I reconnected with my voice, properly. On my own terms.”

VUS’UMUZI
“Have you spoken to her since, Mahlatse?

MoMo
“No.”

VUS’UMUZI
“Would you be keen to?”

MoMo
“No”
VUS’UMUZI
“Why not?”

MoMo
“Why?’
VUS’UMUZI
“MoMo…”

MoMo
“What?”
VUS’UMUZI
“Mo…Mo…”
MoMo
“She sent me a friend request some years ago.”

VUS’UMUZI
“And?”
MoMo
“I blocked her.”

VUS’UMUZI
“MoMo!”

MoMo
“What?”
VUS’UMUZI
“She was a kid.”

MoMo
“And?”
VUS’UMUZI
“She was just a kid.”
MoMo
“I was just a kid.”

VUS’UMUZI
“Precisely, you were just kids.”

MoMo
“She was a child. I was a child. We were both children.
I learned that there are things you’re gonna have to xola with in life without getting the proper closure sometimes, and, and, and… and you just move on. This is one of those things.

I had to literally fight to gain that confidence.

It affected me even when I was doing Tsotsi the Musical, I was older then, but I always had in the back of my mind that voice saying “Mmeeee!” But I managed to overcome it. So… (pause) it’s okay man. (pause) It’s okay.” (beat)

VUS’UMUZI (to audience):
“Mh.
MoMo Matsunyane was cast early.
Early enough to mistake destiny for play,
Enough to wear the work as costume
without knowing it would one day become skin.

At four, she was handed choice in leu,

At six learned how to bloom on cue,
At eight her voice soard… ahead of flock.
Then the air shifted.

A word landed where a wing should have widened.
A sound struck where lift once lived, one wing inward folded.
A hush handed to her mouth, a naming that lingered.

She learned how to wander with one wing tucked in,
How to hover low.

How to hang in the balance, half-faux.
This is the cost of those cast early, is it not?

You learn how to hold height quietly.
How to move without announcing lift slightly,

You learn how much sky remains when latitude is limited.

How to stay airborne while widening altitude.

Then, in the wilderness of gathering,
The folded wing remembered.

Both wings opened.
Then they opened wider.
Flight came fast.

When the wind thinned, she nested.
When the sky closed, she gathered others.

When the air demanded stamina, she led formation.
Accolades followed horizon already earned.

Applause traced paths already flown.

Recognition arrived as echo.
This is the work of those cast lead, is it not?
You learn to fly with damage.

Learn to widen wings anyway.
You learn how silence travels… as memory.

And when the stage opens both wings wide,
the voice does not hesitate.
It enters.
Whole.
BEAT.
LIGHTS FOLD.
END SCENE.