Category: Theatre

A secret history of things

IF YOU HAVE been privileged to have been raised by people with a long history of a complicated relationship with things, you will relate well to the gentle, empathetic and sometimes feisty humour bordering on pathos that characterises Esta Steyn’s gem of an Afrikaans-language radio play this week […]

How to break a cycle of terror

EVERYONE KNEW HER face. Everyone. When SABC anchor Tracy Going was brutally beaten by her boyfriend, it was knowledge instantly in the public domain. This was a story that rocked South Africa, not only for its grotesquely sensationalist value, but it opened up a whole hornet’s nest of […]

Strike honoured, cultures bridged

BORN TO FRENCH-SPEAKING parents, but committedly South African, theatre director, stage actor, film and tv personality, Sylvaine Strike is, according to the French Ambassador, His Excellency Christophe Farnaud, and the power invested in him, a bridge between the two cultures. He said this at a deeply moving, intimate […]

If you go down to these woods today …

TAKE A HANDFUL of western fairy tales. Inject into them a goodly measure of Jungian myth-making, and Rudolf Steiner thinking, spiced with some pop psychology, tight Broadway sequences, a dollop of cynicism, some good rhythmic writing and not a little tongue in cheek-ness and you get a rollicking […]

Comeuppance, richly deserved

WHERE THERE IS smoke in a story involving powerful figures, there is always fire. And the story that wriggles its way out into the public forum is often a cover from one much more sordid and filthy than the public should be allowed to know or can stomach. […]

Stripping Nina’s legacy down

SHE WAS ONE of black America’s iconic figures during the turbulent 1960s. And her songs were grist for the protest mill. But that wasn’t all. You think Nina Simone (1933-2003) – born Eunice Waymon – and you think of the wealth of beauty and subtlety, nuance and fire […]

Murder most delicious

YOU KNOW THE drill. A bunch of sophisticated strangers, honed to the teeth by Agatha Christie’s fine and characteristically succinct descriptions, finds itself isolated from the rest of the world. And everyone’s a little annoying until someone gets themselves murdered. The delicious frenzy of the slick whodunit in […]