Category: Theatre

Tell me another: When political humour gets tired

WHAT WOULD YOU deem the most difficult job in the arts industry? Could it be running a busy top-flight gallery with the difficult egos that come of sensitive artists? Could it be being head honcho to an arts fund-raising initiative, where you have to make decisions and by […]

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 […]

On Aïda and losing the plot

  A TALE OF politics and love, betrayal and death, Verdi’s opera Aïda, composed in 1870, is arguably one of the opera genre’s most known works. Indeed, it’s probably the repository for the most famous ensembles, tunes that you can whistle on your way to the theatre in […]