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Category: Theatre

Ladies who bounce back

THE VETERAN BRITISH actress Miriam Margolyes describes the idea of doing a one-woman show as “lonely and frightening”, in her autobiography, This Much is True. When you see Serena Steinhauer emerge on stage in a flurry of words and wrap herself in the identity of three iconic women […]

Garbed to a T

WHAT ARE YOU wearing right now? Does it pinch and bunch, ride and give you a pain where it shouldn’t? Does it make you feel like a million dollars, nevertheless? Or does it feel delicious but whatever you do, don’t catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror, […]

Present absences and men of war

DO YOU REMEMBER the cultural imperative in South Africa? The thing that you had to see, at all costs, whether it was an opera or an exhibition, a performance or an event? Kentridge’s The Head and the Load evokes this artistic urgency among South Africans, that is at […]

Tricks and balances

WHAT ARE THE odds that a hefty dose of chicanery, some treachery and a handful of sluttery will win the day? In Cat & Monkey, a work rewritten for stage based on the eponymous de la Fontaine fable of the 15th century, Danielle Retief and Rowlen von Gericke […]

Lessons in laughter at devils

AS YOU PUT your hands together in salute of this theatre work, and shift yourself to stand in loyal ovation, you are celebrating and honouring not only this particular theatre work, but the treasure that Pieter-Dirk Uys is to this country. It’s a feeling that floods through the […]

Two wrongs; two siblings

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT a man at the tail end of a long career, who holds tight to his dignity and even tighter to his broken dreams. It’s a quality as much about tragedy and heroism as it is about vulnerability, and in the central role of John Kani’s […]

A ribald tango down memory lane

STRIP THINGS DOWN to their bare basics. What do you really need to make a production that sings while it reaches boldly into the interstices of everyone’s heart? The Old and the Beautiful with Tony Bentel and Fiona Ramsay is a show that has seen many summers and […]