They bray like donkeys when a performer makes a move they’ve never seen before. They clap hysterically at any pause in the music or the movement, assuming this is their cue. They give standing ovations for anything at all. These are our people: South African audiences might have […]
A tatty Johannesburg nightclub, where apartheid is rife, the living is edgy and sex is a panacea for everything: welcome to Cincinatti. This play was workshopped in the late 1970s under the direction of the Market Theatre’s cofounder Barney Simon and a cast of theatre heavyweights of the […]
You are led into the space by a series of lit thick short candles, evocative of the memorial-imbued candles of Jewish tradition. You encounter a woman being washed by another, in a ritual context that is achingly intimate even though it is cast in the thick of audience […]
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 […]
It’s odd to think that a director could get some parts of a film so right, but enable an ending for a film that so profoundly negates all its explored values in one foul swoop. While François Girard’s Boychoir probes the preciously transient phenomenon of the soprano boys’ […]
There’s something dishearteningly unresolved in the overall impact of Stephen Hobbs’s current solo exhibition, which offers a foray into the rhetoric of camouflage and opens a can of vague worms onto a range of hinted at and skirted around army-related political innuendo. The unequivocal saving grace of this […]
Take an ensemble of the best voices in the business right now. Befrock them in an array of habits and foreground the stage musical based on the eponymous film which saw Whoopi Goldberg’s rise to popularity in the early 1990s, and what do you get? Sister Act is […]
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 […]
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