Category: Robyn Sassen

Bogs of war, parodied heroes and the value of Kentridge

HE STANDS WITH assumed dignity on a plinth made of a wooden crate. His face is a morass of rough finger-worked texture, his body is constructed along the classic principles of the portrait bust. On his head, there is a stylised fish, or is it a loaf of […]

Searching for someone

WHEN SOMETHING UNEXPECTED (and unexplained) happens to a stranger in your midst, everyone responds from within their own deep selves, and this week’s riveting Afrikaans-language play by Madelein Volschenk articulates this soundly. Cast against the backdrop of a remote B&B in contemporary South Africa, it bears the characteristics […]

Atrocities of an evil king

IF A PLAY finds you googling for information, or better still, scrabbling amongst your bookshelves after you’ve seen it, it must have done something right. Congo: The Trial of King Leopold II has a fabulous cast and premises rich with dangerous and interesting promise, that points in the […]

There’s a beetle in my bed

CROSS OUT ANY plans you may have for tomorrow, Sunday October 14. The achingly brief season of Steven Berkoff’s Metamorphosis under the direction of Alby Michaels ends on that day, and it is a production you will deeply regret if you miss it. Of the calibre of Molière’s […]

Universal soldiers, Egyptian mummies

ANIMAL FARM. TWO words which conjure up a quirky engagement with political horror, as they refer to one of the more important tracts of contemporary literature. Peter Mammes, in his current exhibition, It’s Already Too Late Once the Soldiers Have Arrived, touches on the kind of wisdom and […]