Robyn Sassen
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.
HUMAN BEINGS HAVE an ugly propensity to be cruel to one another. To throw children to the proverbial wolves out there. To lack basic empathy. The Namibian film Lukas, puts a human face on all of these horrors. Compiled from the true stories of 23 homeless Namibian children, […]
IT’S VERY RARE in this industry, in this country, that audiences are privileged to see skills so sharp and lithe, so wise and developed, in a performer who is so young. Daniel Anderson, at just 24, embraces performance with a full heart and an open soul, but much […]
WE LIVE IN a world that would be unrecognisable to anyone of a previous generation. It’s a world where spite and malice can have legs that last forever and a tail that can destroy lives. Indeed, it’s a world where a silly gag can land a child with […]
IT’S RELATIVELY EASY to mesmerise an audience, with shiny objects and surprising gestures, but what does it take to hold them transfixed? In Off Balance, Mlindeli Zondi and Jack Moloi present a work about being black in a white world, that is rich in cynicism, sprinkled with hard-edged […]
WHAT WOULD YOU do if you discovered that the childhood you had thought was yours, wasn’t? In other words, if you were indeed the magical being every little child who is invested in fantasy from a very young age, yearns to be. In episode 19 of Martyn le […]
WHEN YOU ARE able to be present in a huge concrete interior in which one woman and her voice can with clear authority, take control of the whole space, with a packed audience and a vault that reaches storeys into the sky, you know you are in the […]
WHEN A GOOD storyteller has the skill to worm their way into an established monolith of history, there’s always some meat for a fantastic story. But Ian Gabriel’s Death of a Whistleblower is a lot more than just a great yarn that cuts deliciously close to the bone […]
SHE’S TOUGH. SHE’S wise. She has everything it takes to be conversant and earn respect in the uncouth macho South African man’s world that constituted the SA Police Service in the mid-1990s. She also has what it takes to skip the light fantastic to leap into the abyss […]
THERE’S NOTHING QUITE like being holed in an uncomfortable situation, for an indefinite period, with a colleague you barely know for an ice-breaker to manifest. This is what happens when Maureen from HR (Caroline Midgley) comes to deliver a message to her IT colleague, Barry (Gavin Werner) in […]
WHAT WOULD YOU do if you visited your childhood home, and your parents, as young as they were when you were a small child, opened the door, and recognised you immediately? Only, you’re still you in the here and now and have lived, aged and erred, for some […]
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