Category: Robyn Sassen

Ode to bodies, perfect in their imperfections

HOW DID YOU keep body and soul together during the particularly grim days of Covid-19 hard lockdown? Not in terms of putting food on your table, but in terms of holding your spirit in the place where it should be, to keep you buoyant. A group of Londoners […]

Cattle to believe in

SHE STANDS WITH the kind of poise that catches you in the throat, and once you’ve made contact with her eye, you cannot move on without feeling that something within you has changed. Is it in the sheer beauty of her coat, speckled by God himself? Or is […]

Of family meetings and other lies

THERE IS NOTHING quite like the anger of an articulate playwright to get the currents of electricity flowing through the veins of an audience. My Fellow South Africans by Mike van Graan charges up the levels of political satire with strong potency and his best weapon of choice […]

Just a boy and his Bengal tiger

VERY OCCASIONALLY, THE world offers you an experience which is so utterly perfect in how it touches you, intellectually and spiritually, emotionally and with quirkiness, that it will change how you look at the world. This is what you can expect in the stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s […]

Wrinkles, come with mirth!

HOW DO YOU look back on close to six decades of incredulity at the caveats and bouquets of humour so off the wall that only politicians could have written them? Pieter-Dirk Uys’s latest theatre production, Sell-By Date, which performs at Montecasino until 10 September looks at a lifetime […]

To jol like no one’s watching

FORTY-ONE YEARS AGO, Paul Slabolepszy’s play Saturday Night at the Palace rocked the theatre-going sensibilities of South Africa. This was art so close to the mirror that it reeked and terrified. It’s enjoying a season currently at the Joburg Theatre, under the direction of Albert Maritz and it […]

How to chase thrills

MONEY IS A strange thing. It’s like energy. You don’t have it? Its value changes. You do? Again, it’s something different that speaks to legacy and hope, luxury and a whole range of nice-to-haves. Not everyone might agree with this if you presented them with pocketsful of cash […]

What I put into this bikini

HOWEVER YOU LOOK at it, in the face of wokeness and cancel culture, an opening of our collective hearts and the sparkly proliferation of social media memes celebrating those who are different, we still live in a world of bodily imperatives. In order to be considered ‘normal’ you’ve […]