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.
WHAT IS THE best way of celebrating a grand old dame of hospitality in this city? Should it out-lavish its already rather lavish self, and appeal only to the very wealthy, with exclusive shiny deals? Should it publish a glossy book about all the guests who have stayed […]
FOR SO MANY years, South African film has suffered from what easily can be considered a kind of collective lack of self-esteem. Our film makers yearned to be American in their stories, their accents, their tricks of the medium. But for the past several years, there’s a thread […]
WHAT DO YOU do when the proverbial gift horse looks your way, and makes you an offer you can’t refuse? Earl Stone (Clint Eastwood) is an ordinary kind of 90-year-old divorced guy, who loves to garden much more than he likes family responsibilities. He won’t say no to […]
DO YOU REMEMBER atlases and the unfathomability of the fold up road map? In the pre-GPS days of our world and our sense of geography, the atlas was a subtle and beautiful reminder of how small we are on this planet. Without all the loudness of internet-based hyperbole […]
WOULD YOU VOTE for a simple duck to be your national leader? This bizarre little question comes under the eyeglass in the National Children’s Theatre’s first production of the year. And it’s apt to get many a giggle and a squeal of delight. Duck for President, directed by […]
WHERE THERE IS smoke in a story involving powerful figures, there is always fire. And the story that wriggles its way out into the public forum is often a cover from one much more sordid and filthy than the public should be allowed to know or can stomach. […]
VALENTINE’S DAY’S COME and gone with all its silly platitudes, earnest imperatives and underlying marketing ploys. But there’s a delightful little mad exhibition which is as much a foray on the love of another as it is about a maverick sense of what ifs. Love Letters by Diek Grobler […]
THE ROOM IS deeply silent, but robustly populated. All eyes are focused on the speaker, who is out of your line of sight. In this 1989 photograph of a trade union meeting at the University of Cape Town, photographer Omar Badsha (b. 1945) peers with a clean mix […]
SHE’S PETULANT AND childish, given to fits of rage and gout, and free enough in her sense of authority to lie on the floor and bawl or arbitrarily end someone’s working career, on a whim. Meet Queen Anne, a larger-than-life articulation of the unleashed lascivious baud and out-of-control […]
WHO WOULD YOU hire to be there for you, as you embark on a concert tour where you will be performing to an audience of the most hostile community possible? Pianist and composer Dr Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) had an eye out for the meanest most streetwise racist […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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