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.
SOMETIMES A STORY emblazons itself on one’s memory and sensibilities and stays caught in one’s sense of self, forever. The premises of Peter Shaffer’s devastatingly unusual 1973 play Equus, was to haunt millions. This was a tale as much about conventions as it was about the fierce energy […]
IF YOU REMEMBER the 1980 Jamie Uys film The Gods Must be Crazy or were taught a very simplistic understanding of San rock art in the grade 9 art syllabus, you will have a vague and superficial ability to recognise the complicated magic of Paul Weinberg’s voyages of […]
A TALE OF cheapskates and liars, an anti-capitalist dictum couched in some of the Western world’s most loved and most vicious of ballads, The Threepenny Opera graced Wits’s stages last week, in a student production under the directorial hand of Fiona Ramsay, who teaches them. It sizzles and […]
ISSUES OF BRAVERY and selflessness in 1300s Europe, with all its rivalry and gallantry, come under the loupe in Radio Sonder Grense’s weekly Afrikaans-language radio play this week. It’s an interpretation of Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 play Wilhelm Tell, and translated into the Afrikaans and featuring lots of nips […]
Themes and personal stories for visual art should be grouped in that cliché that warns about making films featuring cute little children and adorable young animals. It treads on very delicate ground and should, at all costs, be avoided or only approached with great self-critical caution, particularly if […]
BECAUSE A PIANO is not the easiest thing in the world to transport, you may find it surprising that Israel-born pianist Amit Yahav, a fundi of the work of Frédéric Chopin, who visited South Africa last year and returns this month, spent most of his formative years travelling. […]
IN EVERY GENERATION, real issues need to be taken seriously by the youth. Ours is no different. And these ‘real issues’ include struggle history. It’s a curious thing to be able to watch the focused attention awarded to a play about youngsters in 1980s South Africa, torn and […]
THE INTERSTICES, RIFFS and possibilities of jazz, from this side of his baritone sax and that, were the central motivating energies of Don Albert, who gave South African jazz a voice in print, radio, television and the internet for over 50 years. He died on April 20, 2019 […]
WHEN THERE’S A polite, clean side to something, you can rest assured that there’s always a wild, irregular messy corollary. And often the latter is more revealing and more interesting. It breaks more rules, it is much less restrained. This is one of the delicious strengths in Gina […]
SOMETIMES ANGELS COME in rude shapes but at the right time in your life. And sometimes you have the perspective and wisdom to recognise them. Anders Geveer is a beautifully crafted Afrikaans-language radio play about the differences that make us human. It’s written by Sophia van Taak and […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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