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.
YOU MAY THINK of them as the creepy crawlies that make you scream when you see them by chance, the six-legged insects that populate the underbelly of our world but Gillian Katz has given life and love to a bunch of ‘goggas’ with their hard carapaces, their noisy […]
JUST WHEN YOU think your hero has met the greatest challenge he’s capable of weathering, he pops to the surface to return victorious again, all cleaned up with the scars on the inside. This is the message prominent in Michael Moer’s reworking and direction of Papillon for 2018 […]
HOLD ONTO YOUR hat and adjust your sunglasses! The end-of-year pantomime for 2018 is everything you need to see you firmly into the silly season. This rendition of Snow White, within the pantomime rubric is loud and bold, funny and clever, slick and quick, and rude, of course, […]
HE’S FIFTEEN YEARS old and higher maths is a doddle for him. Toilet protocol and social behaviour, not so much. Meet Christopher Boone (Kai Brummer), who has Asperger’s Syndrome. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is an astute and carefully focused, hyper-detailed but extremely watchable […]
SHELVE YOUR CYNICISM! The People’s Theatre in Johannesburg presents a no-holds-barred Beauty and the Beast JR, which takes all the schlock and cliché necessary and mushes it together to form a fairy tale of the very finest stripe. Without any irrelevant pantomimish asides, without any lewd jokes for […]
CAUGHT BETWEEN THE social horror of embarrassing and disappointing her parents and the cruelty of destroying her unborn baby, Esther (Saskia Pocock) has just been elected head girl of her high school and her folks are proud of her handsome boyfriend and how her future looks so rosy. […]
AN EXPLORER GETS a lot more than he bargained for, in Martyn Le Roux’s debut Afrikaans-language horror film which released on Vimeo last Friday. It’s a viable model for storytelling and the terror of the tale can be as close as your computer screen, with live-streaming. Die Pelsloper […]
HER FINGERS ARE riddled with arthritis, the skin almost transparent with veins criss-crossing one another. Her eyebrows are pencilled in, in a fashion redolent of years gone by. The red lipstick slips into the crevices of her lips and blue veins punctuate her forehead. But she tells her […]
BOOM! ONTO THE rudimentary set dominated with brown paper explodes a young man in a war helmet (Mathews Rantsoma), manning a paper aeroplane. He’s making sums that no doubt involve geography, mathematics, aviation and pilotry. Matters of consequence, you understand. The theatrical opening of the version of The […]
THE WELSH VILLAGE of Aberfan in October of 1966 weathered a catastrophe worse than anyone could have imagined. At 09:15 in the morning of an otherwise ordinary but wet day, a colliery spoil tip slid down the mountain and drowned a primary school in a 12m-deep avalanche of […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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