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. I am currently a Research Associate at Wits University. This blog promises you new stories every week, be they reviews, profiles, news stories or features.
The utter madness of Roald Dahl’s 1960s runaway success involving a giant peach, a solution to the unhappiness of a small boy at the hands of revolting grown ups and an investment of hope in the future rickety and full of peach flesh though it may be, has […]
Abstract painting may be seen to have had its day, in the avant-garde 1940s and 1950s in the West, when painters of the ilk of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, to name but a few, were in their heyday, cocking snooks at the notion of literal […]
If you or your child don’t mind hectic lashings of strobe lights and multiple doses of high impact bass noise, you’re in for a splendid treat at this year’s pantomime in Johannesburg, Sleeping Beauty, directed by Janice Honeyman. Featuring the inimitable Tobie Cronjé, as Dame Nora Nursey, who […]
Before binaries like politics or gender, what really determines our sense of place in this world? Our grip on the veracity of maps? Our understanding of the sinisterness of germs? Our ability to access colour? Richard Penn’s current exhibition, Surface Detail, may, by and large, be seen to […]
Curating an exhibition of as important an icon in South African visual art as David Goldblatt might sound like a simple task, from the outset: behind the lens and darling of galleries all over the world for close to seven decades, Goldblatt needs no formal introduction to frequent […]
What is it that can take a language coloured by historical violence, a conservative community with historical bias on its hands, and turn them completely around, enabling the community in question to view itself in an hilarious and truthful mirror? The unequivocally miraculous phenomenon of Afrikaans culture that […]
He sits in a beautiful space, filled with books and he contemplates the relentless enormity of loss. This simple gesture is the delicate pivot to A Voice I cannot Silence, a new South African play which gives flesh and poetry to a reflection on the life of Alan […]
Drenched in blood and delicious in its unrelenting dark humour, Steven Stead’s production of Sweeney Todd, the Sondheim classic that blends some of the finest traditions in vocal music, is a real achievement. Headlined by Jonathan Roxmouth in the lead, and Charon Williams-Ros as the dreadfully fine Mrs […]
The filthy scourge of paedophilia has crossed our awareness so frequently and in so much detail in fiction and fact, history and the news, at times lascivious, at times clinical, that it has become humdrum. The film version of Dis ek, Anna (It’s me, Anna) is a fresh and […]
Very occasionally there comes a play which confronts an era from the inside out, with both a sense of empathy and one of hard-edged objectivity, with as complete and yet vulnerable an understanding of how riddled with complexity a given issue can be. Even more occasionally, do you […]
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