Category: Theatre

Tsafendas and the filthy business of purity

EVIL AND TERRIBLE leaders shape our world. It takes someone with a certain level of passionate belief in who he is and what he stands for, to commit the ultimate act of premeditated murder of such a leader. It doesn’t happen often, but it happened during the first […]

Two men in the kitchen

THE BEAUTIFUL UNLOGIC and earnest hyperbole of a nine-year-old in conversation with his elderly grandfather starts this deeply wrenching play about sudden loss and unspoken words. Retief Scholtz’s work Karel se Oupa, was staged a few years ago, at the Market Theatre; it’s been reworked for radio and […]

If you please, paint me a flower

HORROR STORIES OF  interfering in-laws, told with earnestness and wit are so well trodden that they’ve become a cliché all of their own and there are a range of memes on the internet which describe them, both with humour and bitterness. Indeed, it’s seldom that a young couple […]

Lessons in death

WHEN A GREAT story is told, it gathers together diverse energies, glues you to its ebbs and flows and allows you to walk away with its resonances ringing and rumbling in your heart and belly. Sometimes all it takes is a 90 minute foray into a rural landscape, […]

The boy with the courage to gallop

SOMETIMES A STORY emblazons itself on one’s memory and sensibilities and stays caught in one’s sense of self, forever. The premises of Peter Shaffer’s devastatingly unusual 1973 play Equus, was to haunt millions. This was a tale as much about conventions as it was about the fierce energy […]

Your son, in the cross hairs

ISSUES OF BRAVERY and selflessness in 1300s Europe, with all its rivalry and gallantry, come under the loupe in Radio Sonder Grense’s weekly Afrikaans-language radio play this week. It’s an interpretation of Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 play Wilhelm Tell, and translated into the Afrikaans and featuring lots of nips […]

All my tomorrows in a burnt dictionary

IN EVERY GENERATION, real issues need to be taken seriously by the youth. Ours is no different. And these ‘real issues’ include struggle history. It’s a curious thing to be able to watch the focused attention awarded to a play about youngsters in 1980s South Africa, torn and […]

Porcine catastrophe

YOU SHOULD NEVER look a gift horse in the mouth, they say. And sometimes that gift horse comes in a surprising form. In Die Selle, this week’s Afrikaans-language radio drama, which airs on Thursday night, Magda Retief (Karen Wessels) is a woman who lives on a South African […]