Category: Robyn Sassen

Whatever happened to poor Wellington?

HE’S FIFTEEN YEARS old and higher maths is a doddle for him. Toilet protocol and social behaviour, not so much. Meet Christopher Boone (Kai Brummer), who has Asperger’s Syndrome. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is an astute and carefully focused, hyper-detailed but extremely watchable […]

Veronica’s secrets

HER FINGERS ARE riddled with arthritis, the skin almost transparent with veins criss-crossing one another. Her eyebrows are pencilled in, in a fashion redolent of years gone by. The red lipstick slips into the crevices of her lips and blue veins punctuate her forehead. But she tells her […]

In limbo with this Little Prince

BOOM! ONTO THE rudimentary set dominated with brown paper explodes a young man in a war helmet (Mathews Rantsoma), manning a paper aeroplane. He’s making sums that no doubt involve geography, mathematics, aviation and pilotry. Matters of consequence, you understand. The theatrical opening of the version of The […]

It is never only lipstick

THE WELSH VILLAGE of Aberfan in October of 1966 weathered a catastrophe worse than anyone could have imagined. At 09:15 in the morning of an otherwise ordinary but wet day, a colliery spoil tip slid down the mountain and drowned a primary school in a 12m-deep avalanche of […]

Free as a caged love bird

AN ELDERLY WOMAN is found dead in her aviary and the police are summoned to investigate. Thus begins to unfurl a mystery that will keep you leaning in to your wireless until the very end. William Oosthuizen’s gently creepy Afrikaans-language radio play with a strong moral core, Die […]

A prophecy of twins

PREMISED IN THE kind of sing-song voice that you might attribute to the retelling of a bible story, The Season of Glass is a fictional vessel for messianic prophecy, focusing on the birth of twins. But it’s not that simple. As you plunge into this complicated tale of […]