THEY’RE THERE, CONFRONTING you in the audience before curtain up in a polite and distinctly standoffish way, giving off love/hate hospitality vibes like only the British can do. He with his Bryl-cremed hair and moustache and awkward physicality. She with her guttural monotone guffaw, her frowzy wig and […]
VERY OCCASIONALLY, SOMETHING comes along which not only ticks every conceivable box in terms of a great production, but it also sets the audience on fire with delicious abandon, and has otherwise demure people dancing in the aisles like demons; people who will drive home with the CD […]
AS THE FIRST trumpet cadence sounds, of the Annie theme song, before the curtains open, the children in the audience hush in anticipation, jiving in their seats as the jazzy showbiz magic of the tune takes over. Directed by Jill Girard and Keith Smith and featuring the astonishing […]
IT WAS APARTHEID’S jester Pieter-Dirk Uys who some years ago famously cited the shenanigans of the state as being the best possible script writers for his work. He wasn’t alone. Playwright Mike van Graan doesn’t miss a beat in using every dirty nuance and crass irony dished out […]
HOW DO YOU make sense of loss? It’s a relentless pit of remorse and unspoken words, of perhaps guilt and ‘should haves’. It is an uncertain place of not knowing how your absent person would have responded to a given situation. It is in this morass of confused […]
WHEN YOU’RE REALLY little, it seems as though everyone around you has stuff to do and responsibilities to uphold, and because you’re only little, you want to do what everyone else is doing, but you can’t. And you’re bored. And you think you’re not good enough. Meet Manie […]
UNEQUIVOCALLY DARK IN its condemnation of the hypocrisy and divide in society, the Pied Piper of Hamelin was penned by Robert Browning in 1842. Like Charles Dickens’s work, it holds a strange kind of magic which makes it understood to be for children, but the message is grim […]
A MAN EATS some preserved figs and develops a painful wind. Before you know it, the slight discomfort has turned into a severe heart attack, nay, cause for a quintuplet bypass. If there is such a thing. In the blink of an eyelid, he’s been whisked off to […]
FROM THE GET go, you’re in a newspaper environment in a city where young women are currency and business fronts to terrible wheeling and dealing proliferate. This is Betrayal, an English-language radio play by Elma Potgieter, which attempts to bring in all the dirty threads that comprise the […]
PROTEST ERUPTS ONTO the stage with unmitigated fire and authenticity in this beautifully written, tightly constructed reflection on the student protests which rocked South Africa in 2015. The Fall encapsulates the ethos of an era and rises supreme in its focus to become universal in the values and […]
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