Category: Theatre

Of words that cleave the world. And hummingbirds

FILM REVIEW: SMALL ISLAND. A TALE OF hate, love and the indignity of war, Small Island is one of those massive narratives that should enjoy the kind of classic currency of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. With the fabulous Leah Harvey as Hortense, the intense eye to […]

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 […]

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 […]

How to pinch the uncling knight

FILM REVIEW: MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR. HE’S FAT, HE’S lecherous and full of wind and his own sense of potency. This is Sir John Falstaff (Pearce Quigley), who takes centre stage in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, the Globe’s free youtube offering this fortnight. It’s a veritable soap […]

Honourable members, football hooligans

FILM REVIEW: THIS HOUSE. YOU DO NOT need to be an expert in the shenaginans of British political history to be swept away on the current of caustic cynicism and dead pan humour that sutures together this beautiful piece of theatre. James Graham’s contemporary work aligns Tory values […]

Riding dragons

RADIO DRAMA REVIEW: KOUE KAIINGS. ONE THING THAT the mandatory conscription of young men in South Africa during apartheid did was break people literally, and blow them to bits. Another was to break them from the inside out, in a way that the crude eye of rudimentary medical […]