CAUGHT BETWEEN THE social horror of embarrassing and disappointing her parents and the cruelty of destroying her unborn baby, Esther (Saskia Pocock) has just been elected head girl of her high school and her folks are proud of her handsome boyfriend and how her future looks so rosy. […]
AN EXPLORER GETS a lot more than he bargained for, in Martyn Le Roux’s debut Afrikaans-language horror film which released on Vimeo last Friday. It’s a viable model for storytelling and the terror of the tale can be as close as your computer screen, with live-streaming. Die Pelsloper […]
AN ELDERLY WOMAN is found dead in her aviary and the police are summoned to investigate. Thus begins to unfurl a mystery that will keep you leaning in to your wireless until the very end. William Oosthuizen’s gently creepy Afrikaans-language radio play with a strong moral core, Die […]
RAISING IS CHILD is a complicated exercise. More so if you’re firmly entrenched in your own sense of how things should be, if you have the old Afrikaner’s perspective on apartheid, hunting and violence as a backdrop and if the ostensible position of everyone in your life seems […]
WHEN SOMETHING UNEXPECTED (and unexplained) happens to a stranger in your midst, everyone responds from within their own deep selves, and this week’s riveting Afrikaans-language play by Madelein Volschenk articulates this soundly. Cast against the backdrop of a remote B&B in contemporary South Africa, it bears the characteristics […]
WHEN YOU’RE BEQUEATHED a fortune in the estate of an elderly relative who you might not have known as well as you should have, or loved as much as you could have, there’s a price. This is the lesson in Rhona Peens’s Afrikaans-language play Die Testament (The Will) […]
IT IS NOT everyday that you find a truly South African story told with unabashed frankness in the eye of the horror of apartheid. It’s even rarer that you find one that is not only about the broad terrain of apartheid, but one which also burrows in a […]
WHAT WOULD YOU do if you were given the opportunity to take your younger self by the hand and guide him through your most harsh disappointments and challenging detours that you know he will face? This is central to the beautifully flowing Afrikaans-language radio play Laat Herfs (Late […]
IT TAKES A very special writer to be able to strip the emotion of a funeral and infuse it with seriously funny dark humour that forces it to rise to a new level. This is what you will experience in Albert Short’s Ontydige Tydings (Untimely Tidings), an Afrikaans […]
THE JOHANNESBURG NIGHT may feel replete with hidden dangers; the world’s become a depressing place where money is always too tight to mention and challenges are plenty and big. But as soon as Dawid Minnaar gently steps between the paper flowers that fill the theatre space, magic is […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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