RADIO THEATRE REVIEW: DIE HUISBESOEK. WHEN YOU LISTEN to this week’s radio drama on Radio Sonder Grense, you will feel many prickles of lockdown incredulity as a bizarre tale of marital closeness, distance and schizophrenia fills your head. But those prickles have as much to do with a […]
FILM REVIEW: THE WINTER’S TALE. WITHIN THE FIRST fifteen minutes of Blanche McIntyre’s version of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, you understand why the king of Sicily, Leontes (Will Keen) suspects the king of Bohemia, Polixenes (Oliver Ryan) for “bed swerving” with his beautiful wife, Hermione (Priyanga Burford). The […]
FILM REVIEW: THE BARBERSHOP CHRONICLES. WHERE IS IT that African men get to kick back, let their hair down and loosen their tongues? The communal urinal? The local bar? Under the pen of Inua Ellams, it’s the barbershop; South African writers of the ilk of Tony Miyambo, Sue […]
BOOK REVIEW: A CHILDHOOD MADE UP. THE COMPLICATED HORROR of the genre of autobiography is three-fold. It’s about writing convincingly in the first person, which is never as easy as it sounds; it’s about the sense of permanence in a published piece of writing; as it is about […]
REVIEW: AFRIKAANS RADIO PLAY, MY MENSE. A TALE OF life and death, disappointment and purple pencil crayons, Dot Serfontein’s yarn My Mense (My People) is not about great manoeuvres in socio-political injustice. It is not a big story of major seismic shifts. Rather, something like 19th century French […]
FILM REVIEW: MACBETH. OTHERWISE KNOWN AS ‘The Scottish Play’ Shakespeare’s Macbeth is the one tragedy most filled with special effects to make it sizzle with audience accessibility. From witches and ghosts to murderers and phantoms, the work in anyone’s hands has the frisson of sensationalism of any good […]
REVIEW: RADIO DRAMA: WOLF-WOLF HOE LAAT IS DIT? IT TAKES A particular kind of empathy to reflect on the messy values of human deterioration or imperfection without slipping into the cripplingly clichéd or maudlin. It takes an even more incisive understanding of what makes us human beings tick, […]
FILM REVIEW: ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. IF YOU FEEL you deserve something so rich and evolved, something so sophisticated and delicious on the senses, this evening or any time until Wednesday 13 May, don’t lean toward the fridge or the online hot food delivery business. Don’t get despondent that […]
BOOK REVIEW: BETRAYAL BY JONATHAN ANCER. IT’S EASY TO judge someone proven to be in the wrong, someone unmasked and publicly shamed. It’s easy to tut-tut about someone’s malleability in the face of complicated lures. It’s also easy to voice judgemental opinions through the gauze of history, and […]
FILM REVIEW: THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN, FILMED AT THE GLOBE. FRANCESCA MILLS TAKES the soul of this production of The Two Noble Kinsmen, one of Shakespeare’s lesser known works and rolls it between her fingers, thunderously like a god. This performer, who has dwarfism, takes on the whole […]
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