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Author Archives

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.

How to teach a child to ride a bicycle

VICIOUSNESS IS OFT a convenient veil to wear in the face of extreme anguish. Playwright Simon Woods takes a rich and complex understanding of social values and their tipping points in his extraordinary play, Hansard. Coupled with incisive direction by Robert Whitehead and a give-and-take performance by Fiona […]

Lost and found: My baby girl

It was any woman’s absolute worst nightmare. And it was a story that rocked South Africa to its core. In April of 1997, Celeste Nurse gave birth to her first baby at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. A beautiful little girl. Amidst the blur of giving birth […]

Shimmy down memory lane with Kate

A SHOW WITH a gleaming singer in tight sparkly lamé and a fur boa, her memories of the hardships and joys of a life on stage, and an accompanist on piano, sticking to the world’s best standards is not a novel idea. Toss the inimitable Kate Normington into […]

Why I swim

LOSS. IT’S SOMETHING that has characterised so much of our emotional landscape over the past two and a half years, and yet it’s so enormous and universal and specific and intimate that none of us are able to fully cast ourselves around what it means. It’s stupendous. And […]

Do you believe in love after life?

THE CLASSIC THING that any self-respecting ordinary guy will do after witnessing something astonishing is to take it to his buddies in the bar, for a detailed post-mortem over a drink. This is exactly what happens in episode four of Martyn Le Roux’s serialised tale Die Soutwaterheks, (The […]

Ode to a broken forest

IT TAKES IMMENSE skill and maturity to know that the telling of a story filled with detail and drama, with interstices of horror and loss and replete with almost 60-year-old ghosts is done not with gimmicks and tricks, with big noise and flashing lights, but with an old […]

To land in the dark, baton in hand

PICTURE THE SCENARIO. A performance of Gustav Mahler’s first symphony, the Titan, composed in 1888, is about to begin. The bassoonists stand poised, the trumpets in the wings. All due time hewn established pomp and ceremony is de rigueur; performers are in black. The audience is quiet, in […]