Category: Robyn Sassen

How to fiddle when your world is crumbling

SAY THE WORD ‘Fiddler’ in the film context to virtually anyone you meet, and they will know exactly what you mean. Fiddler on the Roof is like Van Gogh’s ear or Beethoven’s Fifth, in a broader cultural sphere. It’s also up there as the pinnacle of shlock culture […]

Tricks and balances

WHAT ARE THE odds that a hefty dose of chicanery, some treachery and a handful of sluttery will win the day? In Cat & Monkey, a work rewritten for stage based on the eponymous de la Fontaine fable of the 15th century, Danielle Retief and Rowlen von Gericke […]

Lessons in laughter at devils

AS YOU PUT your hands together in salute of this theatre work, and shift yourself to stand in loyal ovation, you are celebrating and honouring not only this particular theatre work, but the treasure that Pieter-Dirk Uys is to this country. It’s a feeling that floods through the […]

Two wrongs; two siblings

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT a man at the tail end of a long career, who holds tight to his dignity and even tighter to his broken dreams. It’s a quality as much about tragedy and heroism as it is about vulnerability, and in the central role of John Kani’s […]

SOS: Bath creature in distress

WHEN YOU HAVE a mythical creature lying naked in your bath, how do you convince a colleague who has roughly the same proportions, to bring her smalls over to your apartment, without seeming inappropriate, or completely nuts? This is the conundrum that our hero, Frans (Francois Coertze) finds […]