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.
Take an ensemble of the best voices in the business right now. Befrock them in an array of habits and foreground the stage musical based on the eponymous film which saw Whoopi Goldberg’s rise to popularity in the early 1990s, and what do you get? Sister Act is […]
There’s a kernel in this play that is so demonic and sinister it chills you to your heart, and while all the tools are there for a wise and raw bit of story-telling, for which director Mncedisi Shabangu’s work has become respected, surrounded by generally unconvincing performances, something […]
What would you do if you suspected something appalling was happening in your midst, where an innocent child’s well-being was at stake, and the issue was a disaster you think you might have the power to avert? This is the kind of dilemma embraced in James Cuningham’s stage […]
A sheep looks at you blankly from the interstices of a drawing. But is this really a sheep? Conjoined with a human-evocative body and highlighted by a clasped-together pair of chicken’s feet, the current exhibition of charcoal and paint works on paper by Colbert Mashile is about much […]
There’s an element of such blatant lasciviousness in the framework, articulation and texture of Jemma Kahn’s new kamishibai-redolent production that you have to laugh. Sex, like death onstage, needs to be handled with a level of spoof that expunges earnest urgency and enables it to entertain without sliding […]
The thrill of being in the presence of fresh young work as it hatches is incomparable. When you sit in the audience of this delightful work, created in entirety by students, you realise the palpable dynamite that there is in this industry, waiting to explode into professional careers. […]
When a theatre production takes on a classic work of prose and gives it new life, the audience is fortunate. When this new life is articulated with such fire and wisdom that the original words of the master are seared with new energy, the audience is privileged. When […]
It’s relatively easy to glamourise the 1950s. The fashions are beautiful and dignified. The architecture is poetic. The times were ripe with sex and possibilities: the world was on its knees after two major wars, and the cultural pendulum was swinging back: anything was possible. Truth be told, […]
There’s a glimmer of brush marks, a frisson of lines drawn and redrawn over one another, a glimpse of rapid yet deep engagement between artist, subject and canvas that you access in being in the presence of this exhibition of close to 40 works – the first solo […]
From the first opening bars of this extraordinarily powerful South African ballet, you get riveted to the score, the choreography and the story, almost exactly in that order, as the monstrous work unfolds. Spartacus of Africa is a mammoth achievement, the likes of which South African audiences don’t […]
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