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.
A TALE OF politics and love, betrayal and death, Verdi’s opera Aïda, composed in 1870, is arguably one of the opera genre’s most known works. Indeed, it’s probably the repository for the most famous ensembles, tunes that you can whistle on your way to the theatre in […]
THERE IS ALWAYS time for schmaltzy love stories, particularly when they are beautifully crafted and resonate with so many values that give you an understanding of what love is all about. Wessel Pretorius’s delicate RSG Afrikaans-language radio play Mike en Mavis ticks all these boxes, within a Casablanca […]
FILMS COME AND go. What is it that gives one life beyond a single viewing? When you watch Alfonso Cuarón’s astonishingly fine autobiographical film, Roma, for the first time, this thought may cross your mind. Twenty years down the line, you may still be holding on to some […]
WHAT WOULD YOU say to your only sibling if you knew you were dying? This week’s sensitively crafted Afrikaans-language radio play is a tale of sibling love, disappointment, and making good in the precious time one is allotted. Premised on the marriage idiom that every pot has a […]
DON’T FALL INTO the trap of taking the lull in theatre productions in Johannesburg at this time of year as an indication that there’s nothing worth seeing. Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III filmed by the National Theatre Live, takes the prize for the finest bit of […]
IN THIS LIFETIME, you may be lucky enough to come across a dinkum sprite. A piece of quicksilver. A someone who doesn’t fit in anywhere, who makes their own rules and in doing so, changes the world’s parameters. And if you’re not lucky enough to meet that magical […]
THEY TEETER INTO the theatre on high heels, with grotesque wigs askew and sparkly gloves, reeking of the kind of skanky, grubby ethos that defined 1980s Hillbrow or 1990s Troyeville in a very typically South African context. This is the cast of the first half of Heaven is […]
SOMETIMES IT TAKES a brilliantly constructed and superbly rendered farce to make you not only crack a smile but guffaw from the belly in a way that gets the endorphins flowing. This is the kind of thing you can expect from the current production of The Play that […]
GOOGLE THE NORTHERN Cape town of Blikfontein. “There’s nothing there!” you may shriek, as you try to zoom in closer and closer, discovering a couple of shrubs and a lot of hot air. Indeed. Blikfontein is the focus of this week’s Afrikaans-language radio drama, which broadcasts on Radio […]
HOW DO YOU respond to a person you love deeply – have loved deeply for many years – when you know they are slipping away from you? This is the central underlying thread in The Ward, a book of photographs by Gideon Mendel published in Britain by Trolley […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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