A story of survival, told live: Lose to Win hits Queanbeyan

Posted on 23 April, 2026

As a young boy in Sudan sitting under the night sky, Mandela Mathia would dream of performing in the Promised Land.

Listening to elders spin myths and folktales late into the night – loud, physical and funny stories rather than solemn and hushed retellings – he knew that laughter was his language of connection.

Now, as he prepares to step onto the stage for his one-man show Lose to Win, he’s using that joy to tell a story that goes beyond the script. It’s his story – one of survival, migration, racism, hope, and hard-won belonging.

Lose to Win takes audiences through Mandela’s extraordinary journey. From fleeing war-torn Sudan as a child, to living in Egypt, to eventually making his way to the stage, it’s a poignant solo work. And it’s showing at The Q for one night only on Saturday 2 May.

“When I was born, we were always living in survival mode. Even from birth, I was not supposed to be here, and I’ve grown up with that on my mind,” he says.

“We were looking forward to the Promised Land so we could start to feel safe. To feel like a human being again, go to school, eat and breathe like just normal people can, because that wasn’t the case when I was living in South Sudan.”

For Mandela and his family, the Promised Land was Australia. And the stage was his salvation.

“I knew that at one point I needed to share my story, to just let people know what really happened to the family,” he explains.

“But I think over time, as I was growing up in Western Sydney, it became bigger than just about my family and myself.”

Escaping Sudan and surviving the streets of Egypt, living in Blacktown presented its own challenges for Mandela. Seeing what the South Sudanese community was dealing with in Australia at the time – including casual and overt racism – he says that he wanted Lose to Win to open a space for reflection.

Asking the question ‘How do we decide who belongs?’, he says that since the show first premiered at Belvoir Theatre in 2024, the response has been exactly what he hoped for.

“People come with me on that journey from the beginning and see me coming to Australia thinking it’s going to be this promise land full of milk and honey. Peaceful. But then there was another problem of what we didn’t expect to be facing as a community.”

“It gave the broad Australian community the chance to reflect on that and see that the migrant community do go through certain things when they come here.”

Using storytelling, music, and dance to share his journey, Mandela chose to make Lose to Win a one-man show for a simple reason: he didn’t believe he had the skills to tease out the other characters.

But hearing a story told by the person who lived it is powerful.

And while he always dreamt of being an actor in Australia, Mandela didn’t study drama until he was accepted into the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA).

“When I started high school here, I started to feel like there was a possibility I might not be able to do it. I just found that maybe I was too late, the language was a little bit of barrier…I didn’t even do drama in high school,” he says.

“I went to TAFE and did a year for a Certificate III in Film and Theatre. And that’s when I heard about NIDA. That’s when I started to pursue it from there.”

Described as a significant piece of multicultural storytelling, Lose to Win is more than a performance. For Mandela, the point of the show isn’t to recount hardship or show off his acting chops (although he does do both) – it’s to suggest a way forward.

“I like to use a metaphor of making a cake. Usually, there’s a lot of different ingredients of how you can make a cake in one go. And rather than one person bringing all the ingredients by themselves, I want everybody to bring the different ingredients that we need to make that cake,” he explains.

“Somebody can bring the flour; somebody can bring the eggs and water and sugar. Everybody bakes this cake together.”

“This is the metaphor that I want people to think about…that our differences and uniqueness is not to be seen as weaknesses.”

Intimate, uplifting, and full of heart, audiences will leave Lose to Win with a deeper understanding of what it is like to come to Australia as an immigrant.

As for Mandela, he’ll leave knowing that little boy in Sudan achieved his dreams – and they were worth the journey.

Photography: Brett Boardman.