Category: Theatre

Whodunnit with a Karoo twist

IF YOU GET a special thrill out of the character definitions and wiles of an Agatha Christie murder, you will absolutely love every trick and nuance in Anton Treurnich’s Afrikaans-language radio play this week. Stille Waters is a tale crafted out of the idiosyncrasies of small town personalities. […]

The boy who loved movies

THE RITUAL OF watching a film in a darkened auditorium, on plush seats as we munch popcorn and cold drink is something that has been endemic to our culture for decades. It’s a moment of escapism, in which you can see dreams come true and watch magic happen. […]

Do you believe in magic?

FEELING JADED BY all the sham, fake news and broken dreams that this world is dishing out to all of us right now? Well, there may be an antidote. Scholars and sociologists of the ilk of Rudolf Steiner, Joseph Campbell and others drew their threads of belief out […]

My heart belongs to the sea

HOLIDAY TIME BECKONS and a young white South African family comprising two little girls, a teenaged son and their parents are readying themselves for their annual seaside vacation. Bessie (Simonè Benjamin) is but 19. She’s brown. And she’s employed as the family’s nanny. And she’s never seen the […]

Haunted by Matlakala

THE PLIGHT OF melanin-deficient people came under the medical marketing spotlight in South Africa through the month of September, which made the brief staging of Arthur Molepo’s contemplation on albinism Mama, I want the black that you are, particularly prescient. It’s a complicated work told with a hand […]

Blemished church, broken lesbians

THE NAUSEATING CLASH of religious dogmaticism and sexualities which contradict hetero-norms is not something new. If you look at the issue of sexuality more broadly and infuse it with an historical glance at the culture and persecution of so-called witches, it simmers and seethes there too. Young playwright […]

Unbearable weight of beauty and brains

CAN YOU IMAGINE the damaging complexity of being deemed “the most beautiful woman in the world”? This was one of the descriptions that dogged the complicated life of Austrian born American bombshell Hedy Lamarr, who most certainly was more than just a pretty face. Less acknowledged than her […]

Evita’s no woman. She’s a legend.

THE QUEEN IS dead. Long live the queen. So begins Pieter-Dirk Uys’s current foray into the shenanigans and hypocrisies that have been the Vaseline of South African political intercourse for the last 40 years, and #HeTwo does the unthinkable. Uys, in his 70s, continues to ratchet up the […]