Category: Theatre

Mr Chips and the myth of the never-ending story

WHAT DO YOU do if, by the time you’re in your late 20s, your dream career bottoms out and you’re caught in a whirlwind of ennui and the need to redefine yourself? Why, you’ll probably tootle off to your mum for sympathy, sanction and maybe direction. That’s roughly […]

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 […]