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.
PICTURE THE SCENARIO. We’re in the Johannesburg suburb of Bertrams with all its broken dreams, building repair sites and street-based hawkers. It’s Septemberish in 2016. The air is hazy with pollen, but complicated with the excitement of a new entity. And a bunch of people, some of whom […]
A LITTLE IMPROVISATION never goes amiss. Or so thinks Hermaans Potgieter when his wife leaves her almost-ready-to-bake cake for a few minutes in his bored presence. Joey van Niekerk’s Afrikaans-language radio drama Die Prys, which broadcasts this week on Radio Sonder Grense, is a sweet and conventional comedy […]
YOU MAY THINK you know the back story behind the coronavirus pandemic. You probably do know how it has impacted your life and your immediate circle. But when you have finished watching Alex Gibney’s magnificently made documentary Totally Under Control which is about how the world’s richest power […]
IT WAS IN the hurly burl of someone else’s wedding that Lauren (played by Nicole Schaeffer) had her ‘aha!’ moment about the idea of not having children. This is the central core to Lauren, the ninth episode in the Ink Jockey podcast series The End of the Line, […]
EIGHT MONTHS AGO, you may have called a story with its heart in the cruel grip of an epidemic ‘apocalyptic’. Tomorrow evening, when you listen to the radio drama interpretation of CJ Langenhoven’s novella Mof en Sy Mense, you will recognise all the rawness of loss and the […]
THERE’S SOMETHING RICHLY poignant about the glitz and perfume of a vibrant theatre industry that we once loved deeply and maybe took for granted. There’s something terrifying about a society in lockdown which allows its art freelancers to be tossed under the proverbial bus, many of them with […]
MONA IS A school teacher. She’s also in her mid-30s. With an acerbic tongue that hits on the mark every time, she extrapolates on her life, the men in it, and the offensive opinions of parents of entitled children, tossing her experiences in the face of her decision […]
THERE’S A DISARMING pragmatism about “Svetlana”, the seventh episode in the podcast series The End of the Line, which focuses on the stories of contemporary women who have elected not to have children. Svetlana’s narrative is about living in a world that hasn’t been taken care of, and […]
TRIBUTE TO ANDY MCGIBBON, RESEARCHED BY ZOE MOLL. MUSIC IS A complicated craft. Not only is it about tunes and compositions, technique and tone; it’s also about the object from which the music comes: a world of six strings, spruce and mahogany, the guitar has the capacity to […]
TAKE AN ALREADY spooky kind of atmosphere, sprinkle it with some werewolf detritus and the nuts and bolts of a conventional thriller, and you will find yourself sitting on the edge of your seat this evening, for the 90-minute long Bloedmaan, an Afrikaans-language radio drama on Radio Sonder […]
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