A freelance arts writer since 1998, I fell in love with the theatre as a toddler, proved rubbish as a ballerina: my starring role was as Mrs Pussy in Noddy as a seven-year-old, and earned my stripes as an academic in Fine Arts and Art History, in subsequent years. I write for a range of online and print publications, including the Sunday Times, the Mail & Guardian and artslink.co.za and was formerly the arts editor of the SA Jewish Report, a weekly newspaper with which I was associated for 16 years. This blog promises you new stories every week, be they reviews, profiles, news stories or features.
THREE YOUNG SOUTH African men with fabulous repartee and a bag of psychological issues are what you will encounter in this brand new gem of local theatre. The Kings of the World is a play effectively about nothing: crumbling dreams, cloudy suppositions, silly beliefs and thin promises. Constructed […]
WHAT DOES IT take for a pretty love song to morph into a universal standard or an absolutely adored cover? Does it have to do with how frequently the audience may get to hear the tune? Or perhaps it has to do with its presence on the musicals […]
A TALE OF gentrification and blues where sex is the underlying parlance and song lifts the dialogue into a different realm, Dominique Morisseau’s Paradise Blue is an African American foray into the complexity of the future for a 1949 Detroit club owner. The production, directed by James Ngcobo […]
South African storytelling has rich veins of possibility that draw not only from farm novel traditions, but also the criss-crossing of many cultures and biases that soils its reputation, but makes for good meaty yarns. This is what you will find in Victor Gordon’s sterling work Brothers, an […]
IT TAKES A very special blend of confidence in your own narrative talents and knowledge of the medium to be able to take on one of the greatest classics that the country in which you were raised cherishes like the bible, and to win at it. Ladj Ly’s […]
THE SADDEST CASUALTIES in 1917, the highly feted First World War film earmarked for Academy Awards in 2020, are the important memories of the Mendes family. Clearly premised on precious tales of war passed down through generations, this is quite obviously a film with a lot of family […]
IT WAS A show that posed cheeky questions at well-established values, blew smoke in the face of modesty and even cocked a snoot at narrative flow. And this was in 1973, when the Rocky Horror Show first saw light of day. This madcap tale of forbidden pleasures and […]
GREAT WISDOM AND subversive whimsy were central to the thinking, writing and art of Ingrid (Muffin) Stevens, who was fascinated by the meaning and histories of decoration. Deemed a matriarch of the South African art world in terms of the reach of her influence, the straight-talking toughness (but […]
The sickening cycle of bullying and abuse is central to Evil, an important and compelling work which takes the nub of what makes men try and break one another and dissects it. Not only a foray into the complexity of society and behaviour, the work is taken to […]
JUDY GARLAND. THE words themselves smack of red glittery stuff and evoke the sparkle and passion of the career of arguably American showbiz’s greatest, who began as a precocious toddler, sung some of the western world’s most beautiful recognisable standards and was wasted by the realities of her […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
Recent Comments