Category: Robyn Sassen

Don’t mess with Mamela

DANCE REVIEW: PEST CONTROL. YOU DO NOT need to know the dirty politics of the arts in contemporary South Africa in order to access the angry new dance missile which Mamela Nyamza launches at this year’s National Arts Festival. You do not need to know the specifics of […]

Everything about Bottom, as it fell out

FILM REVIEW: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM AT THE GLOBE THEATRE. A miasmic tale of darkness and tomfoolery, which ramps amateurism up to the skies and has a denouement that sees everyone in the arms of their rightful lover, Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is notorious for its complexity, double- […]

Films that make us tick

TEASER FOR AFRIKAANS RADIO DRAMA: DIE BLIKSLIM. READY FOR A CRUNCHINGLY good bit of Afrikaans-language radio drama this evening? Well, you need to take up the position, next to the wireless. Under the direction of Renske Jacobs and with the penned words of Martyn le Roux, this week’s […]

How to dance about a virus

DANCE REVIEW: CUT. AS THIS ALMOST 17-minute long video begins, you feel torsion in your gut. The layers of the kind of discomfort one experiences in lockdown are articulated in the impossibly, claustrophobic tight frames and how the dancer is from time to time rudely cut from his […]

Of mice and ants, and being in the world

THEATRE TEASER: THE ADVENTURES OF MANIE THE ANT. JOHAN ‘SWANNIE’ SWANEVELDER is an alchemist. He has the potent ability to change objects as idiosyncratic and evocative, but also as commonplace, as a pair of socks, into sensate beings that can tell beautiful stories of great wisdom, humour and […]

Things in madam’s fridge

RADIO DRAMA REVIEW: DIE LYK. WHAT DO YOU do when you kill your impossibly annoying husband in error? This is the quandary that besieges Trudie (Elzabe Zietsman) in this week’s Afrikaans-language radio drama, by Karin du Toit, which debuts tonight, 11 June, at 8pm on Radio Sonder Grense. […]

Predicaments of kingship

TEASER FOR A FILM: THE MADNESS OF GEORGE III. SOMETIMES A THEATRICAL production sails through your values like an absolute tornado. It tickles all your funny bones and gets the intellectual cogs in your head whirring. Mark Gatiss takes the lead of the 2018 Nottingham Theatre production of […]

Ode to a city of kites and crows

FILM REVIEW: CORIOLANUS. THE UNCOMFORTABLE MYTH which sees a greatly loved hero get vilified and banished with the ebbs and flows of societal energies is one of the streams of narrative that infuses Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. But like his works of the ilk of King Lear, there is so […]

Song to Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

RADIO DRAMA REVIEW: AS ‘N KIND KOM KUIER. FILTERED THROUGH WITH botanical references and the best of African jazz, the trajectory of Zelda Bezuidenhout’s Afrikaans-language radio drama As ‘n Kind Kom Kuier, which debuts this evening on Radio Sonder Grense, is one that sings to the wisdom of […]