DO YOU REMEMBER building forts with the cushions from your parents’ lounge suites and wearing your bedspread as a cloak and a colander as a helmet as you shouted loud and feral words and regally waved a ruler in the air? Alan Swerdlow’s current production of The Hobbit […]
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 […]
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 […]
A BUILT-UP PLACE is so much more than a dot on a map. It’s a repository of history and emotions, of architecture and lives. But how do you catch its essence: the stuff of which it is made, today and yesterday? How to you portray the energy that […]
YOU ALWAYS KNOW you’ve hit upon something huge, when the FBI comes knocking on your door. All the best thrillers contain this kind of trope. But how do you tell your closest friends about this secret before the official blokes dressed in black get wind of it? In […]
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 […]
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 […]
SHE WAS A feminist before it was fashionable, a French Impressionist born in Pennsylvania, a woman painter in a man’s world. She took intaglio printmaking by the horns and created arguably one of the world’s most valuable collections of images. This was Mary Cassatt. Her story Mary Cassatt: […]
STRIP THINGS DOWN to their bare basics. What do you really need to make a production that sings while it reaches boldly into the interstices of everyone’s heart? The Old and the Beautiful with Tony Bentel and Fiona Ramsay is a show that has seen many summers and […]
THE SYMBOLIC POWER of the waiting room pervades an understanding of life itself. It’s a turbulent mix of helplessness in the face of some greater force, conjoined with the complex energy of an end crookedly and precariously in sight. Just out of focus, and around the corner, as […]
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