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.
In ‘Stinkhout’, Frank Opperman and Wilhelm van der Walt take you flawlessly through three generations of white South African men. Hands-on emotion is hard. It’s embarrassing. Shame-worthy. They’ve been definitively schooled by defining moments of war and loss. Mental illness flows through the family’s blood. Taboo must be kept taboo.
Onstage, it is just Ingrid and her words, her wine, her complex articulation of love and her brutal experience of despair. The letters are unabashed in their eroticism and give-and-take, but Jonker’s aloneness is candidly central. This theatre-making gesture makes you consider the loneliness of being in the world, altogether.
‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ has a strong moral back bone without being clean of fart and snot jokes that are endemic to being a tween, and performed, by a cast which is itself, adolescent, is nothing short of a magical success on the part of its director, Vicky Friedman.
It is a long play, but such is the storytelling acumen and the passionate focus of Mthombeni, that as she begins, you completely lose yourself in its hairpin interstices. You become a molecule in a story which is at once horrifying and messy, tragic and cruel, yet beautiful and mythical.
Taking you unflinchingly to the bedside of his elderly mother, flailing with dementia but sometimes starkly spot on in her lucidity, Peter Godwin’s memoir, ‘Exit Wounds’ laced with alliteration vigorously contemplates the complex texture of the life of a Zimbabwean-born war correspondent, with British ties who currently calls America home.
Myra Egdes’s ‘The Goldfish Bowl and Other Stories’ is a kind of ‘sowing of wild oats’ series of moments for young women, and in being so, it offers a rich slice of life that comments on the world and the implicit sense of protection for young travellers from South Africa.
It is soprano Lise Davidsen in the double-sided role of Fidelio and Leonore, that holds the moment with such acuity, you cannot take your eyes off her. Her presence raises this opera to a paean of hope in the face of injustice, and absolute excellence in the face of mediocrity.
In ‘Thrill Me’, lighting in tandem with language and movement achieves greatness, lifting the spectacle to a sinister monochrome in the face of the greatest sin one human being can perpetrate against another. Balance in the performers’ movements and the story’s nuances, makes it satisfying on eye, ear and mind.
As loud, hard-edged stage musicals go, where the characters are dwarfed by massive technological sets, the lyrics are profoundly superficial and the lights set to penetrate your eyelids, Dear Evan Hansen presents technical competence. There are some beautiful moments of harmony between singers. Stuart Brown opposite Michael Stray collaborate compellingly.
On a level, Micaela Jade Tucker’s one-woman play is an advocacy piece about taking care of a woman’s body, with all its tendencies to pick up judgement, viruses and other things. It’s about broken condoms, reeling ideas in and taking responsibility for who you think you are in the world.
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