Bitter Winter makes space in homes and hearts for the other

The play brings together people different in race, age and class and allows something to develop between them: a language of recognition. By Joy Watson

- Joy Watson

Written by Paul Slabolepszy and directed by Lesedi Job, Bitter Winter follows the unravelled life of once renowned actor Jean-Louis Lourens (André Odendaal) and TV star Prosper Mangane (Oarabile Ditsele), who audition for roles in a cowboy film. Chantal Stanfield appears in a supporting role.

What begins as an awkward encounter soon cracks open into something far more personal, a reckoning with age, race, pride and belonging.

By the time I saw Bitter Winter for the second time, I already knew it had settled under my skin. I went first with a close friend and then again with my partner, and each time we sat in quiet tears. The play didn’t shout, but it left a mark. What stayed with me wasn’t just the characters or the plot. It was the space between them, the ache of what goes unsaid, the invisible weight we all carry.

That's where the play lived for me, in the pauses, the slow work of trying to reach one another. It’s a story that is at once sharply funny and quietly devastating, the kind of play that makes you laugh through a lump in your throat. But what truly lifts it is the rare, electric alchemy between Odendaal and Ditsele. I've never seen a stage dynamic quite like theirs. They are effervescent together - listening, giving, sparring.

I sat down with Odendaal to talk about that space — the unnameable place where ageing, loss and language meet.

'You're feeling it'

“When I first read the script, I didn’t think oh wow, what a role,” Odendaal said. “I thought this is something I need to do because of what it says about this time in our country, in the world.

“Especially for older people who are often pushed aside, ignored. We still have something to offer.”

Odendaal is clear-eyed about what it means to grow older in a culture that equates youth with value. “I finally feel like I know what I’m doing,” he said. “And just as I've mastered something, I'm supposed to step aside?