IT TAKES A very special level of respect for a story to be able to tell it with the dignity and complexity it warrants and not teeter off into preachiness or sensationalism. Ellen Pakkies is a real woman who was raised in the Cape Flats context of unrelenting […]
HOW DO YOU make sense of loss? It’s a relentless pit of remorse and unspoken words, of perhaps guilt and ‘should haves’. It is an uncertain place of not knowing how your absent person would have responded to a given situation. It is in this morass of confused […]
A MAN EATS some preserved figs and develops a painful wind. Before you know it, the slight discomfort has turned into a severe heart attack, nay, cause for a quintuplet bypass. If there is such a thing. In the blink of an eyelid, he’s been whisked off to […]
THE STAIN OF a great tragedy doesn’t readily – or perhaps ever – lose its penetrative impact on any of the people who it touched. This is the thread that binds the contemporary characters with the historical ones in Christopher Joynt’s new Afrikaans radio play, Kolskoot Visagie, a […]
NEPOTISM, CORRUPTION AND other kinds of detected shenanigans in the management of a Pretoria old aged home which has passed its prime comes under the delicious loupe of Joe Kleinhans’s vision in this lovely Afrikaans-language play with a tight structure and a strong sense of geriatric morality. It […]
A MURDER, A suicide, a mysterious letter and a court case are the central elements of this intriguing yarn cast in the context of South African violence. Based on a true story which hit the media in 2012, Skink vir my ‘n whisky is a subtly developed Afrikaans-language […]
WHAT DO YOU do when bad news seems to come in a rolling tsunami? From disappointments at work to unexpected secrets from your children, a wife with an addiction issue and a mother-in-law with a leaking toilet and a mouth that doesn’t let up on the overriding commentary […]
ALL SET NIEMAND really ever wanted to be was a pianist who distinguished himself from the pack. But the universe stepped in with a more complicated reward. This nifty science fiction work penned in Afrikaans by Schalk Schoombie is certainly something to cosy up to the wireless for, […]
IF THE COMPLICATED plight of an intelligent woman entrapped in a domestic structure, penned in the 19th century, is the kind of tale that grabs you, don’t go out tomorrow evening. Even if you’re not a Henrik Ibsen buff, Suzanne van Wijk’s Afrikaans-language translation of the Norwegian playwright’s […]
GHOULS READY TO pilfer your soul residing at the bottom of the garden, superstition and ritual and a septic wound are the ingredients that give ‘n Voorlopige Begrafnis (a Provisional Funeral), Albert Short’s Afrikaans radio drama which broadcasts this Thursday evening, a healthy dollop of the unexpected. Blended […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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