Category: Afrikaans

How to sidestep what Daddy left you

It’s about the wiliness of a five-year-old and the mess of political and geographical possibilities in the interstices of the Cape Flats and what can happen in the blink of an eye to a child who recognises an ostensibly friendly grown-up’s hand, without analysing it or colouring it in fear.

Sons and brothers

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.

Just me and my black dog

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.

Weltschmerz and glitter

Now in her sixties and not afraid to take hold of the world with both hands, Elzabe Zietsman’s revue comprises a mêlée of songs which she has penned and others she has moulded to fit South Africa’s unique levels of hypocrisy, hatred and hope, sometimes all in the same breath.

How to shelve the darkness

When it comes to the marvellous Elzabe Zietsman performing ‘Routrip’, in pure, beautiful, unapologetic Afrikaans, in this city at last, you just have to switch off the social media, disregard your diary and simply go. It performs at 3pm at The Studio Theatre, Montecasino in Fourways on 20 October 2024.

To that box of photos that got lost

IN HIS EXQUISITE 2008 tractate on death and dying, English writer Julian Barnes comments that just as every writer will have a last reader, so every grave will have a last visitor. South African artist Maria Pienaar takes this profound reflection a step further, contemplating the last viewer […]

We are stardust

WHAT WOULD YOU do if you discovered that the childhood you had thought was yours, wasn’t? In other words, if you were indeed the magical being every little child who is invested in fantasy from a very young age, yearns to be. In episode 19 of Martyn le […]

Hit the road, jock!

UP UNTIL NOW, we’ve had inklings of the great powers of ‘our’ mermaid Salacia (Elzahn Dorfling) , in Martyn le Roux’s serialised podcast, Die Soutwaterheks, but nothing beyond what could easily be seen to amount to party tricks and complex mystical theories, really. In episode 18, you get […]