The play scooped the Best Production and Best Script Awards at Khaya Multi-Art Centre in KwaMashu during the isiGcawu Festival in November 2012.

“The Weeping Candle is about the past coming back to haunt you,” says Mncube. “The truth always has a way of coming out. The show’s message reinforces the moral, ‘do unto others as you would want them to do to you’, underlining the truism that every wrong deed you commit impacts destructively on someone else’s life.”

The Weeping Candle’s plot depicts a shebeen queen who sees a young man strolling around her shebeen after hours. The man insists on having only two beers after a hectic game he’s just played. Is he there to have the beer? Why has he come in at that time, since he knows she is closed? What unfolds is a complex story that reveals the intentions of the young.

Mncube, a 2011 Drama graduate of Durban University of Technology (DUT), was voted Best Actor and also won the Standing Ovation Award for his performance in Samson Mlambo’s one-hander, Meet Bra 62, at Durban’s 2012 Musho Festival. Other stage credits in 2012 included performing in Horn of Sorrow at the Hilton Arts Festival and in Musa Hlatswayo’s dance piece, Zulu no Qwabe, at The Playhouse. He was voted Best New Comer at the 2012 Mercury Durban Theatre Awards.

Musa Ntuli, another DUT drama graduate, counts among his recent stage credits, appearances in Paul Rudman van Wyk’s Behind The Curtain of Justice during the 2013 Musho Festival. He also performed in Essop Khan’s production, Front Page News, which toured South Africa in 2012, and appeared in Sandy Bigara’s Animal Tales at the Catalina Theatre.

Nompilo Maphumulu won the Best Actress Award for her performance in K-Cap’s production, The Serpent’s Tail, in 2011, and was placed second overall among the actors who participated in that year’s isiGcawu Festival. This success was consolidated by the powerful impact the gifted young actress made when the production was mounted during the 2012 Community Arts Festival at The Playhouse.

Performances are on from Friday,1 to Sunday, 3 March at 18:00. The show’s duration is 45 minutes. Tickets cost R45. Book through Computicket 0861 915 8000 or online at www.computicket.com. The Weeping Candle is not for people under 16 years.

Stable Theatre acknowledges support received from Ethekwini Municipality and the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Arts and Culture.