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.
RADIO DRAMA REVIEW: KOUE KAIINGS. ONE THING THAT the mandatory conscription of young men in South Africa during apartheid did was break people literally, and blow them to bits. Another was to break them from the inside out, in a way that the crude eye of rudimentary medical […]
FILM REVIEW: A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. THE ROLE OF Blanche du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire has, since 1947 when Tennessee Williams first penned it, become iconic as a reflection of the tawdry vulnerability and bravado of a character losing her moorings, while she pretends to be […]
RADIO THEATRE REVIEW: DIE HUISBESOEK. WHEN YOU LISTEN to this week’s radio drama on Radio Sonder Grense, you will feel many prickles of lockdown incredulity as a bizarre tale of marital closeness, distance and schizophrenia fills your head. But those prickles have as much to do with a […]
TRIBUTE TO HARRY KALMER, RESEARCHED BY KEZIAH GUNTER. TELLER OF THOUSANDS of the world’s hidden stories, Harry Kalmer was a man of immense skill, spirit and curiosity. He believed in the value of new experiences and no job was too humble for him to gain a grip on […]
FILM REVIEW: THE WINTER’S TALE. WITHIN THE FIRST fifteen minutes of Blanche McIntyre’s version of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, you understand why the king of Sicily, Leontes (Will Keen) suspects the king of Bohemia, Polixenes (Oliver Ryan) for “bed swerving” with his beautiful wife, Hermione (Priyanga Burford). The […]
FILM REVIEW: THE BARBERSHOP CHRONICLES. WHERE IS IT that African men get to kick back, let their hair down and loosen their tongues? The communal urinal? The local bar? Under the pen of Inua Ellams, it’s the barbershop; South African writers of the ilk of Tony Miyambo, Sue […]
BOOK REVIEW: A CHILDHOOD MADE UP. THE COMPLICATED HORROR of the genre of autobiography is three-fold. It’s about writing convincingly in the first person, which is never as easy as it sounds; it’s about the sense of permanence in a published piece of writing; as it is about […]
REVIEW: AFRIKAANS RADIO PLAY, MY MENSE. A TALE OF life and death, disappointment and purple pencil crayons, Dot Serfontein’s yarn My Mense (My People) is not about great manoeuvres in socio-political injustice. It is not a big story of major seismic shifts. Rather, something like 19th century French […]
FILM REVIEW: MACBETH. OTHERWISE KNOWN AS ‘The Scottish Play’ Shakespeare’s Macbeth is the one tragedy most filled with special effects to make it sizzle with audience accessibility. From witches and ghosts to murderers and phantoms, the work in anyone’s hands has the frisson of sensationalism of any good […]
REVIEW: RADIO DRAMA: WOLF-WOLF HOE LAAT IS DIT? IT TAKES A particular kind of empathy to reflect on the messy values of human deterioration or imperfection without slipping into the cripplingly clichéd or maudlin. It takes an even more incisive understanding of what makes us human beings tick, […]
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