From the outset, before this rollicking monster of a production gets into its stride, the presence of the blood-stained wooden gate, the empty rubber boots and the cawing, mooing, snorting and barking in the sound track, lend Neil Coppen’s Animal Farm its inimitable tone. It’s very dark. It’s […]
They controversially deemed themselves more popular than Jesus Christ. Their songs are probably better known than Shakespeare. At 21 they were immortal. But they didn’t do it alone. This absolutely beautiful play reflects on the mysterious character of Brian Epstein, the record shop assistant who became manager of […]
There’s a kernel in this play that is so demonic and sinister it chills you to your heart, and while all the tools are there for a wise and raw bit of story-telling, for which director Mncedisi Shabangu’s work has become respected, surrounded by generally unconvincing performances, something […]
What would you do if you suspected something appalling was happening in your midst, where an innocent child’s well-being was at stake, and the issue was a disaster you think you might have the power to avert? This is the kind of dilemma embraced in James Cuningham’s stage […]
There’s an element of such blatant lasciviousness in the framework, articulation and texture of Jemma Kahn’s new kamishibai-redolent production that you have to laugh. Sex, like death onstage, needs to be handled with a level of spoof that expunges earnest urgency and enables it to entertain without sliding […]
When a theatre production takes on a classic work of prose and gives it new life, the audience is fortunate. When this new life is articulated with such fire and wisdom that the original words of the master are seared with new energy, the audience is privileged. When […]
It’s relatively easy to glamourise the 1950s. The fashions are beautiful and dignified. The architecture is poetic. The times were ripe with sex and possibilities: the world was on its knees after two major wars, and the cultural pendulum was swinging back: anything was possible. Truth be told, […]
The power of gender as a signifier for being in the world is incontestable. Consider all the transgender debates setting fire to social media and fingering critics as suffering from irretrievable bigotry, when they use the wrong pronoun for a trans individual. The sex of a stranger has […]
As she walks onto the stage, bent over by her smoker’s cough and her palpable despair, Anna-Mart van der Merwe, in the role of Fugard’s ‘Millie’ magnetises the audience. She portrays the squalid baseness of poverty and worthlessness in an early 1970s South Africa with a sense of […]
A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy? The eponymous Norman Jewison musical from the 1970s, based on a series of stories by Shalom Aleichem may be high schlock to most contemporary audience members, but it retains its status as a modern classic, for a whole rash of reasons, […]
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