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) […]
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 […]
RADIO IS A strange medium. Without all the bells and whistles of television, it has the power and the capacity to reach much deeper and more intimately into our lives. While the radio’s on, we can be spared from our loneliness, soothed to sleep, stimulated to respond to […]
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 […]
FROM THE GET go, you’re in a newspaper environment in a city where young women are currency and business fronts to terrible wheeling and dealing proliferate. This is Betrayal, an English-language radio play by Elma Potgieter, which attempts to bring in all the dirty threads that comprise the […]
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 […]
THE AIRPORT: A place of meeting and greeting, of tearful goodbyes and certain levels of anxiety – particularly given the history our world has faced with the complexity of flight. Playwright Frances Slabolepszy does a delicious kind of a mash up in this English medium radio play, in […]
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 […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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