WHEN THE FIRST thing you do after watching a period drama is to scour the bookshelves to find a particular volume and then secrete yourself between its pages, to gorge yourself on the story and the writing, you know the filmmakers have done something right. This is precisely […]
IF YOU ARE of a certain era, you hear the name ‘Clementina van der Walt’, and think immediately of a very specific type of ceramic object which became classically the work of this South African potter in the 1990s. They were bold and kind of clunky, they featured […]
SHE WAS NOBODY. That is, until she met and married mining magnate Sir Lionel Phillips, and gave life to the possibility of the Johannesburg Art Gallery – amongst other things – which became central to much of her life’s ambition. Lady Florence Phillips is an icon in historical […]
WAR. IT’S A time of cruelty and violence, of value-shifting upheaval and horrible surprises. War history, by its very nature is clustered with rich and timeless stories of hope and love. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a film based on the eponymous novel, that […]
AS YOU OPEN the first page of A Several Plot, and step into the whirligig of 16th century European society, with all its costumes and class structure, its hierarchies and ravaging illnesses, so may you be forgiven for feeling as though you’re no longer of the 21st century. […]
IT’S ONE THING to take a beautiful novel and translate it into a film which drives a similar story line. It’s quite another to parade a film under the title of said novel, but twist its ending into something else entirely. Curiously, Ian McEwan who wrote the novel […]
HE WAS THE man who gave voice to the ordinary people in South Africa, those who travel for hours in public transport, work in ignominious circumstances and earn a pittance in KwaNdebele. Not afraid to go down mine shafts, or gaze at white Afrikaners in the eye, and […]
EVERY ONCE IN a while a novel might cross your path that snatches at every spare minute you have and occupies your every waking hour – until you’ve found out whodunit, that is, or how the narrative comes to closure. When you read Marilyn Cohen De Villiers’s Deceive […]
BEING ALIVE ON this African continent is a very complicated thing, particularly if the home in which you were raised has become lethally hostile to you. Investment analyst by day, fictional writer by night, Bulawayo born Sue Nyathi, who burst onto readerships’ awareness in 2012 with her debut […]
Remember Sesame Street and the values it espoused on generations of children? Well, 15 years ago, the makers of Avenue Q worked with its basic puppetting premises and ramped it up to a whole new set of narrative values. Now, in its 15th year, it explodes in a […]
Recent Comments