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.
WHEN YOU FIRST ‘meet’ Busi (Petronella Tshuma), the lead in Jerome Pikwane’s local horror film The Tokoloshe, you are grabbed by her sense of excruciating vulnerability faintly covered with a veneer of bravado. She’s young, she’s desperate and she cannot turn down this security job because she’s really […]
WHEN AN ARTIST – of whatever stripe – steps up to the proverbial mic and loses all sense of the audience in front of her, with just the song on her lips or fingers, something unforgettable happens. Ask any performer – be they a pianist or a drag […]
HE STANDS WITH assumed dignity on a plinth made of a wooden crate. His face is a morass of rough finger-worked texture, his body is constructed along the classic principles of the portrait bust. On his head, there is a stylised fish, or is it a loaf of […]
IAN MCKELLEN TAKES full and unexpurgated possession of all the complexities of a great king ravaged by the suspicion of daughterly disloyalty and onset and brokenness of dementia in this major and magnificent production of arguably Shakespeare’s most important tragedy, King Lear. Indeed, on so many levels, this […]
LOOK WEST OF the heart of the city of Johannesburg and you will find the suburb of Mayfair. Not like the status-driven Mayfair of London or the one in the game of Monopoly, Johannesburg’s Mayfair has historically been a place of complexity, blending rich and poor, community tradition […]
WHEN SOMETHING UNEXPECTED (and unexplained) happens to a stranger in your midst, everyone responds from within their own deep selves, and this week’s riveting Afrikaans-language play by Madelein Volschenk articulates this soundly. Cast against the backdrop of a remote B&B in contemporary South Africa, it bears the characteristics […]
IF A PLAY finds you googling for information, or better still, scrabbling amongst your bookshelves after you’ve seen it, it must have done something right. Congo: The Trial of King Leopold II has a fabulous cast and premises rich with dangerous and interesting promise, that points in the […]
WHEN YOU’RE BEQUEATHED a fortune in the estate of an elderly relative who you might not have known as well as you should have, or loved as much as you could have, there’s a price. This is the lesson in Rhona Peens’s Afrikaans-language play Die Testament (The Will) […]
THE SAD THING about living in this society, tainted as it is by political rhetoric, is that after having weathered the kind of circumstances which saw our former president Jacob Zuma use hundreds of millions of tax payers’ rands to create his own personal luxury compound – among […]
THE DRAWN LINES lie discrete and individual as they are draped over the three dimensional forms in this understated, but very powerful exhibition of drawings by Pretorian artist Boitumelo Diseko. A meditation on the men lost at Marikana, this body of close to 40 pen and ink drawings, […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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