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.
WHAT DO YOU tell your small daughter when you are a brilliant engineer and astronaut, and the opportunity of a lifetime comes your way? Of course, being the mother (not father) to said eight-year-old, throws the whole monster of generations of sexism to the fore. This is what […]
Combining a rich, yet candidly legible ensemble of platitudes and values, nostalgia and truths, without slipping into a pond of maudlin and with several hilarious and jolting bends in the tale, Bernabé Rico’s One Careful Owner is a complete delight, which will bring on the tears of tonic […]
It is 1948 and Lithuania is caught between the tail end of Hitler’s cruelty and the as yet unrevealed horror Stalin’s slippery promises. Unte (Marius Povlias Elijas Martynenko), with his sultry, almost androgynous yet somewhat mongoloid features is the ponderously gentle central protagonist. He’s a son, yet not […]
VERY, VERY RARELY may a play cross your awareness that is so perfect in all its criss-crossing of parts and references, of loss and love and birth and possibility, that you feel completely absorbed in the characters’ lives. And you hold on to each unfolding dialogic second because […]
THE IDEA OF writing a conventional tribute to Linda Givon, the founder of the Goodman Gallery, who died suddenly on 5 October 2020, at 84, seems trite. This is because she was much more than the pedestrian sum of her parts. She was born, educated, married, divorced, widowed. […]
PICTURE THE SCENARIO. We’re in the Johannesburg suburb of Bertrams with all its broken dreams, building repair sites and street-based hawkers. It’s Septemberish in 2016. The air is hazy with pollen, but complicated with the excitement of a new entity. And a bunch of people, some of whom […]
A LITTLE IMPROVISATION never goes amiss. Or so thinks Hermaans Potgieter when his wife leaves her almost-ready-to-bake cake for a few minutes in his bored presence. Joey van Niekerk’s Afrikaans-language radio drama Die Prys, which broadcasts this week on Radio Sonder Grense, is a sweet and conventional comedy […]
YOU MAY THINK you know the back story behind the coronavirus pandemic. You probably do know how it has impacted your life and your immediate circle. But when you have finished watching Alex Gibney’s magnificently made documentary Totally Under Control which is about how the world’s richest power […]
IT WAS IN the hurly burl of someone else’s wedding that Lauren (played by Nicole Schaeffer) had her ‘aha!’ moment about the idea of not having children. This is the central core to Lauren, the ninth episode in the Ink Jockey podcast series The End of the Line, […]
EIGHT MONTHS AGO, you may have called a story with its heart in the cruel grip of an epidemic ‘apocalyptic’. Tomorrow evening, when you listen to the radio drama interpretation of CJ Langenhoven’s novella Mof en Sy Mense, you will recognise all the rawness of loss and the […]
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