IT IS NEVER the story itself; it’s how you tell it that makes a tale sing. Damien Chazelle’s film First Man, which celebrates the story of Neil Armstrong – the world’s first man on the moon – fits this bill perfectly. It’s the tale of not only a […]
THERE’S STILL TIME to change your plans today and go and see what is arguably the finest piece of dance that has graced Johannesburg’s stages in a long while. Dark Cell, choreographed by Themba Mbuli and Fana Tshabalala is a contemplation on the horror of political incarceration. Focused […]
ARGUABLY THE CHILDREN’S classic with the most, Le Petit Prince was penned and illustrated in 1943 by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It was one of the last gestures he made to the world before he disappeared in what is presumed a war incident. Now, 75 years later, this tender, […]
RAISING IS CHILD is a complicated exercise. More so if you’re firmly entrenched in your own sense of how things should be, if you have the old Afrikaner’s perspective on apartheid, hunting and violence as a backdrop and if the ostensible position of everyone in your life seems […]
WHEN YOU FIRST ‘meet’ Busi (Petronella Tshuma), the lead in Jerome Pikwane’s local horror film The Tokoloshe, you are grabbed by her sense of excruciating vulnerability faintly covered with a veneer of bravado. She’s young, she’s desperate and she cannot turn down this security job because she’s really […]
WHEN AN ARTIST – of whatever stripe – steps up to the proverbial mic and loses all sense of the audience in front of her, with just the song on her lips or fingers, something unforgettable happens. Ask any performer – be they a pianist or a drag […]
HE STANDS WITH assumed dignity on a plinth made of a wooden crate. His face is a morass of rough finger-worked texture, his body is constructed along the classic principles of the portrait bust. On his head, there is a stylised fish, or is it a loaf of […]
IAN MCKELLEN TAKES full and unexpurgated possession of all the complexities of a great king ravaged by the suspicion of daughterly disloyalty and onset and brokenness of dementia in this major and magnificent production of arguably Shakespeare’s most important tragedy, King Lear. Indeed, on so many levels, this […]
LOOK WEST OF the heart of the city of Johannesburg and you will find the suburb of Mayfair. Not like the status-driven Mayfair of London or the one in the game of Monopoly, Johannesburg’s Mayfair has historically been a place of complexity, blending rich and poor, community tradition […]
WHEN SOMETHING UNEXPECTED (and unexplained) happens to a stranger in your midst, everyone responds from within their own deep selves, and this week’s riveting Afrikaans-language play by Madelein Volschenk articulates this soundly. Cast against the backdrop of a remote B&B in contemporary South Africa, it bears the characteristics […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
Recent Comments