LEAH’S LONG-AWAITED PREGNANCY is coloured by the complicated emotions of hormonal changes, but bruised by other things in her world. Complete with a fickle boyfriend and an over enthusiastic mother, it seems the world into which her little baby will emerge is doomed. Ronel Mostert’s love story ‘n […]
SHOLEM ALEICHEM COULD do this. As could Isaac Bashevis Singer. And in the vein of great Yiddish tales told through a humble cipher, this week, you will get to hear, in Afrikaans, the work of Hendie Grobbelaar which reflects a base yet deep and rich understanding of local […]
WHO CAN EVER pooh-pooh the pathos and tragedy of Tevye the dairyman? Living in a small shtetl in an Eastern European place called Anatevka, which is threatened by rising anti-Semitism, this character, penned by the inimitable Sholem Aleichem from 1894 is the profoundly religious father of five feisty […]
A THRILLER WITH a twist, this week’s Afrikaans-language radio drama, Nag van die Ver Musiek offers glimpses of the ghoulies that may lurk in your dreams or your closet (or your past), but it is held together chillingly with Brahms’s lullaby – played on an old music box […]
VERY, VERY RARELY may a play cross your awareness that is so perfect in all its criss-crossing of parts and references, of loss and love and birth and possibility, that you feel completely absorbed in the characters’ lives. And you hold on to each unfolding dialogic second because […]
PICTURE THE SCENARIO. We’re in the Johannesburg suburb of Bertrams with all its broken dreams, building repair sites and street-based hawkers. It’s Septemberish in 2016. The air is hazy with pollen, but complicated with the excitement of a new entity. And a bunch of people, some of whom […]
A LITTLE IMPROVISATION never goes amiss. Or so thinks Hermaans Potgieter when his wife leaves her almost-ready-to-bake cake for a few minutes in his bored presence. Joey van Niekerk’s Afrikaans-language radio drama Die Prys, which broadcasts this week on Radio Sonder Grense, is a sweet and conventional comedy […]
EIGHT MONTHS AGO, you may have called a story with its heart in the cruel grip of an epidemic ‘apocalyptic’. Tomorrow evening, when you listen to the radio drama interpretation of CJ Langenhoven’s novella Mof en Sy Mense, you will recognise all the rawness of loss and the […]
WHAT DO YOU do when your moaning pal slips in a “and might I borrow your revolver for the night?” kind of a question? If you’re Alexei Alexeyevich (Johann Nel), you lend him, instead, your ear. This is the nub of another delicious bit of Chekhov, magicked into […]
NOT EVERY WOMAN out there is a defenceless shrinking violet as cliché and politically-correct rhetoric may tell you. Take the one who bursts into the private toe-related agonies of Kistunov, a 19th century Russian curmudgeon and banker (played by Johann Nel) to beleaguer him with her own domestic […]
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