‘Master Harold’ is about the love and the shame and the hate that gets rolled into one messy stream of anger in the face of caring for a broken parent. And it is about the way in which a primal gesture can so sully a conversation that it annuls it.
Life, death, betrayal and the heaviness of loss were brought onstage to Johannesburg high school students in the form of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Armed with pure use of period language, a deep understanding of purpose and meaning and a rich clarity of narrative, they were perfect.
While LaFarge’s immersive book ‘Sting in the Tale’ (Doppelhouse Press 2021) doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive; it splits the fabric of what truth means when you are making art and allows this idea to stretch wide. Wider than you can believe. It challenges the values of education and truth. Scrumptiously.
In Mike van Graan’s ‘The Good White’, the pieces are all in place for an explosive denouement. Add a bit of protest performance, the demon of gender-based violence, and some shenanigans in the wrong bedroom, and you get the picture: It’s a scenario tense with energy and brittle with distrust.
Based on a snippet from the New Testament, involving the relationship between Herod’s step-daughter and the powers that be, Salome features Yochanaan (John the Baptist), played by Peter Mattei in excruciating scenes touching on cruelty and madness, with a touch of necrophilia and nuances of child sexuality in the mix.
Prowse’s career was remarkable. She canoodled with the biggest names in the biz, but she gave blood, sweat and tears to her craft in hefty doses and her niece does her proud in not oohing and aahing with platitudes, but in giving an exceptional life feasibility without rendering Prowse godlike.
In ‘Black Coffee’, everything, from a complete colour wheel of deadliest poison, to the toby jug in the room, to the sub-plot of secret plans for a bomb, not to forget the costumes and pin curls of the era, is perfectly handled. This is a well-made play at its best.
In Lucas Hnath’s ‘A Doll’s House Part 2’, there is empathy and fierceness in the give and take between social values. Zane Meas opposite Bianca Amato is splinteringly fine in his masculine vulnerability and sense of impotence with a softened edge of reconciliation for the damage that mansplaining can bring.
Telling your own story with its sensitive veils of family nuance is never easy. The “I” in the tale can be tyrannical and cause more damage than healing. Bo Petersen’s portrayal of apartheid and of her father’s choices is compassionate and complex. You weep with empathy; you stave off judgement.
From teen girls dangerously ready for life in a world beset with the joys and terrors of being alive in 2010 to a lone driver some years later, trapped in her safety belt, the thread of humanity is cast in the hands of a police detective: And the result? Dynamite.
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