This production is a re-staging of a play written in exile by Anthony Akerman, banned by the censors in 1983 but performed to great acclaim three years later. During that historical moment, Somewhere on the Border directly addressed the anxieties of (predominantly white) audiences about compulsory military service, the “bush wars” in Angola and elsewhere, and the ugly end game of apartheid in “civilian” society. In 2011 André Odendaal recruited a young cast – most of whom, fresh out of Drama School, weren’t even alive in 1986 – and revived the play at the National Arts Festival. Based on its success, producer Kosie Smit secured consecutive runs in Cape Town and Johannesburg this year.

Somewhere on the Border is the story of five young conscripts. They are temperamentally, ethically and “ethnically” different: even though they are all white, they are divided by language (English/Afrikaans), religion (Christian/Jewish/agnostic) and, fundamentally, by their attitudes towards apartheid. Despite this, as they are broken in by their sadistic and foul-mouthed bombardier (Charlie Bouguenon), they develop a shared fraternal bond – one that is tested, and ultimately ruptured, when they are sent to fight the “communists” in Angola.

In one sense, the play falls into a dramatic genre familiar to anyone who has watched Vietnam war films such as Platoon (or even, to draw on an example from the South African stage, Greig Coetzee’s White Men with Weapons). This facilitates a generic response. We suppress a squeamish delight at the creative vulgarity of the bombardier – the range of insults relating to mothers’ and sisters’ (and even cows’) genitals is quite remarkable, and there is a kind of perverse poetry in the crude verbal onslaught of the barrack room and the parade ground. We soften towards the unpleasant characters and we discover that the sympathetic characters are also tainted and compromised; that is, we learn to see them all as equal victims of the war and the society that spawned it.

Yet the play is also entrenched in a particular time and place, in its discourse and diction, and – relentlessly – in the appalling nuances of racial dynamics in southern Africa in the 1980s. Lest this production of Somewhere on the Border should become a narcissistic exploration of the multiple pathologies of whiteness (or an echo of that plaintive cry, “Whites also suffered under apartheid!”), Ndino Ndilula appears sporadically onstage to embody the “blackness” that the young troepies are trained to fear and hate. In different guises, Ndilula mocks the soldiers, cowers before them, threatens them and ultimately forces them to confront their complicity in the apartheid military machine.

In the same way, Akerman’s play turns the mirror towards each audience member. I was forced to acknowledge that I had no better idea of what it was like “on the border” than anyone else in the auditorium – South African or otherwise. I am part of that lucky thirty-something generation of white men: old enough to say “I grew up under apartheid” (and thus to disavow the historical obliviousness of the children of the transition or the born-free youngsters), but young enough to say “I wasn’t conscripted” (and therefore able to distance myself from all that the Defence Force represented).

But we’re all complicit, white and black, in one way or another – not guilty, necessarily, perhaps not even responsible, but ineluctably bound to apartheid and its consequences. For this reason, Somewhere on the Border is as fresh today as it was 25 years ago.