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.
IF YOU’VE BEEN reluctant to watch part two of Die Pelsloper because you’re afraid to do so alone and in the dark, ‘reluct’ no more. The story, coined by Martyn Le Roux, takes on roughly where it left off, but sprinkled with a theme of love rather than […]
ARMED WITH RELENTLESS creative energy and passion, a hefty respect for the craft of performance and a crooked grin, Pieter Howes (formerly Pieter Bosch Botha), charmed the theatre industry and made audiences laugh until they wept for almost 30 years. He took his life on May 4, 2019. […]
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 […]
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