For those who died as cattle

IT TAKES IMMENSE skill and maturity to know that the telling of a story filled with detail and drama, with interstices of horror and loss and replete with almost 60-year-old ghosts is done not with gimmicks and tricks, with big noise and flashing lights, but with an old […]

Give me fame, fortune and glory!

WHAT IS A teen flick? Dealing with issues and dreams too big to fit a framework suitable for pre-adolescents, it should contain the values that feel relevant to youth, but not flow too deep or wide to be irresponsible, and yet retain a relevance that’s neither prissy nor […]

How to teach a child to ride a bicycle

VICIOUSNESS IS OFT a convenient veil to wear in the face of extreme anguish. Playwright Simon Woods takes a rich and complex understanding of social values and their tipping points in his extraordinary play, Hansard. Coupled with incisive direction by Robert Whitehead and a give-and-take performance by Fiona […]

Lost and found: My baby girl

It was any woman’s absolute worst nightmare. And it was a story that rocked South Africa to its core. In April of 1997, Celeste Nurse gave birth to her first baby at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. A beautiful little girl. Amidst the blur of giving birth […]

Shimmy down memory lane with Kate

A SHOW WITH a gleaming singer in tight sparkly lamé and a fur boa, her memories of the hardships and joys of a life on stage, and an accompanist on piano, sticking to the world’s best standards is not a novel idea. Toss the inimitable Kate Normington into […]

Why I swim

LOSS. IT’S SOMETHING that has characterised so much of our emotional landscape over the past two and a half years, and yet it’s so enormous and universal and specific and intimate that none of us are able to fully cast ourselves around what it means. It’s stupendous. And […]