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.
The chorus of ‘The Portrait of Dorian Gray’ wins the day. It articulates just the right level of shrieking witch howls to keep the work ticking over and yet off-key. The texture of their presence evokes the disparity created by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki in his avant-garde contemplations of horror.
Ziaphora Dakile, Kitty Moepang and Barileng Malebye take hold of this script which forces them into the personas of many: old and young, black and white, good and evil, with sophisticated empathy. Vying between English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa, it uses idioms that you understand from your intestines, if not grammatically.
You must see ‘The Piano Lesson’ because of Lerato Mvelase as Berniece and Warren Masemola as Lymon. Masemola, all limbs and voice, carries his character, an outsider to the unfolding family tale, with engaging lightness. Mvelase plays a woman with a deep sense of injustice she’s not afraid to use.
‘Bitter Winter’ happens in a waiting room. It’s about apartheid and the shifting of the world from analogue to digital. It’s about how tightly one holds onto one’s embarrassing and life-forming secrets as it is about being in the same proverbial boat as another actor, regardless of age or experience.
Pillowman darkly brings together very difficult moral values. Without a clear sense of political context, the work is like a conventional police whodunnit with a good cop/bad cop motif. It’s also like an expose of a dictatorial regime. And finally it confronts Jewish and Chinese identity, mental disability and murder.
In the hands of Daniel Butcher-Geddes, The Jungle Book’s all fun and games until the really scary beasts are part of the fray. And it’s here that you will see easily the finest snake puppet given life on stage in this country by Virtuous Kandemiri in the role of Kaa.
In Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s 2024 novel ‘Before we forget kindness’, the quality of line work in the descriptive passages is so achingly beautiful and so fascinatingly spare, it makes you feel like you are reading Japanese. The metaphors are simple, clear and rich. The sense of colour is memorable and strong.
In ‘n Begin, written by David Eldridge and translated by Nico Scheepers, the picture of life for both Laura and Daniel is not what either of them were raised to believe it would be. Happily ever after and never again alone are myths they acknowledge, now in their late-30s/early 40s.
‘Not Pop-Pop’ is about how grown-ups look away from some situations, but children won’t. Containing idioms like the idea of walking in someone else’s sneakers or how calling someone a bum is rude, the story doesn’t speak down to a small boy in the face of a great social issue.
With Craig Urbani and Graham Hopkins at the helm as Professor Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering respectively and 23-year-old Leah Mari between them as Eliza Doolittle, the unrefined flower seller, under the direction of Steven Stead, Lerner and Loewe’s ‘My Fair Lady’ is a recipe made in musical theatre heaven.
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