Category: Uncategorized

Everything about Bottom, as it fell out

FILM REVIEW: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM AT THE GLOBE THEATRE. A miasmic tale of darkness and tomfoolery, which ramps amateurism up to the skies and has a denouement that sees everyone in the arms of their rightful lover, Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is notorious for its complexity, double- […]

Films that make us tick

TEASER FOR AFRIKAANS RADIO DRAMA: DIE BLIKSLIM. READY FOR A CRUNCHINGLY good bit of Afrikaans-language radio drama this evening? Well, you need to take up the position, next to the wireless. Under the direction of Renske Jacobs and with the penned words of Martyn le Roux, this week’s […]

How to dance about a virus

DANCE REVIEW: CUT. AS THIS ALMOST 17-minute long video begins, you feel torsion in your gut. The layers of the kind of discomfort one experiences in lockdown are articulated in the impossibly, claustrophobic tight frames and how the dancer is from time to time rudely cut from his […]

Farewell to Papy Groove

TRIBUTE TO MANU DIBANGO BY ELIZHAN DUVENAGE. CAMEROONIAN SAXOPHONIST, PIANIST, vibraphonist and composer, Manu Dibango, fondly known as Papy Groove, played an important role in innovating jazz in the last several decades. He was celebrated for his own brand of Afro-jazz, and cherished for his 1972 dance album […]

Of mice and ants, and being in the world

THEATRE TEASER: THE ADVENTURES OF MANIE THE ANT. JOHAN ‘SWANNIE’ SWANEVELDER is an alchemist. He has the potent ability to change objects as idiosyncratic and evocative, but also as commonplace, as a pair of socks, into sensate beings that can tell beautiful stories of great wisdom, humour and […]

Things in madam’s fridge

RADIO DRAMA REVIEW: DIE LYK. WHAT DO YOU do when you kill your impossibly annoying husband in error? This is the quandary that besieges Trudie (Elzabe Zietsman) in this week’s Afrikaans-language radio drama, by Karin du Toit, which debuts tonight, 11 June, at 8pm on Radio Sonder Grense. […]

Predicaments of kingship

TEASER FOR A FILM: THE MADNESS OF GEORGE III. SOMETIMES A THEATRICAL production sails through your values like an absolute tornado. It tickles all your funny bones and gets the intellectual cogs in your head whirring. Mark Gatiss takes the lead of the 2018 Nottingham Theatre production of […]

RIP Ventura Rosenthal: Heavenly harpist

TRIBUTE TO VENTURA ROSENTHAL RESEARCHED BY MISHKA OLIVIER. NONA VENTURA ROSENTHAL, a brilliant musician and a true treasure to everyone who met her, gave a friendly and popular profile to the notoriously difficult-to-play harp. She succumbed to breast cancer, which she had battled since 2014, on 6 November […]