Telling your own story with its sensitive veils of family nuance is never easy. The “I” in the tale can be tyrannical and cause more damage than healing. Bo Petersen’s portrayal of apartheid and of her father’s choices is compassionate and complex. You weep with empathy; you stave off judgement.
In ‘Stinkhout’, Frank Opperman and Wilhelm van der Walt take you flawlessly through three generations of white South African men. Hands-on emotion is hard. It’s embarrassing. Shame-worthy. They’ve been definitively schooled by defining moments of war and loss. Mental illness flows through the family’s blood. Taboo must be kept taboo.
Onstage, it is just Ingrid and her words, her wine, her complex articulation of love and her brutal experience of despair. The letters are unabashed in their eroticism and give-and-take, but Jonker’s aloneness is candidly central. This theatre-making gesture makes you consider the loneliness of being in the world, altogether.
‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ has a strong moral back bone without being clean of fart and snot jokes that are endemic to being a tween, and performed, by a cast which is itself, adolescent, is nothing short of a magical success on the part of its director, Vicky Friedman.
It is a long play, but such is the storytelling acumen and the passionate focus of Mthombeni, that as she begins, you completely lose yourself in its hairpin interstices. You become a molecule in a story which is at once horrifying and messy, tragic and cruel, yet beautiful and mythical.
It is soprano Lise Davidsen in the double-sided role of Fidelio and Leonore, that holds the moment with such acuity, you cannot take your eyes off her. Her presence raises this opera to a paean of hope in the face of injustice, and absolute excellence in the face of mediocrity.
In ‘Thrill Me’, lighting in tandem with language and movement achieves greatness, lifting the spectacle to a sinister monochrome in the face of the greatest sin one human being can perpetrate against another. Balance in the performers’ movements and the story’s nuances, makes it satisfying on eye, ear and mind.
As loud, hard-edged stage musicals go, where the characters are dwarfed by massive technological sets, the lyrics are profoundly superficial and the lights set to penetrate your eyelids, Dear Evan Hansen presents technical competence. There are some beautiful moments of harmony between singers. Stuart Brown opposite Michael Stray collaborate compellingly.
On a level, Micaela Jade Tucker’s one-woman play is an advocacy piece about taking care of a woman’s body, with all its tendencies to pick up judgement, viruses and other things. It’s about broken condoms, reeling ideas in and taking responsibility for who you think you are in the world.
This tale is about the women who have awaited their absent men for hundreds of years. It is also about men who go into the world to create lives for themselves, knowing – or maybe forgetting – about the domesticity born of innocent love, that waits for them in a rural place.
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Chester Miggels
Gillian Rennie
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Geoff Sifrin
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Kapisha Ramraj
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Palesa Moore
Peta Kaplan
Robyn Sassen
Saleemah Shaik
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