LOOK WEST OF the heart of the city of Johannesburg and you will find the suburb of Mayfair. Not like the status-driven Mayfair of London or the one in the game of Monopoly, Johannesburg’s Mayfair has historically been a place of complexity, blending rich and poor, community tradition […]
WHEN SOMETHING UNEXPECTED (and unexplained) happens to a stranger in your midst, everyone responds from within their own deep selves, and this week’s riveting Afrikaans-language play by Madelein Volschenk articulates this soundly. Cast against the backdrop of a remote B&B in contemporary South Africa, it bears the characteristics […]
IF A PLAY finds you googling for information, or better still, scrabbling amongst your bookshelves after you’ve seen it, it must have done something right. Congo: The Trial of King Leopold II has a fabulous cast and premises rich with dangerous and interesting promise, that points in the […]
WHEN YOU’RE BEQUEATHED a fortune in the estate of an elderly relative who you might not have known as well as you should have, or loved as much as you could have, there’s a price. This is the lesson in Rhona Peens’s Afrikaans-language play Die Testament (The Will) […]
THE SAD THING about living in this society, tainted as it is by political rhetoric, is that after having weathered the kind of circumstances which saw our former president Jacob Zuma use hundreds of millions of tax payers’ rands to create his own personal luxury compound – among […]
THE DRAWN LINES lie discrete and individual as they are draped over the three dimensional forms in this understated, but very powerful exhibition of drawings by Pretorian artist Boitumelo Diseko. A meditation on the men lost at Marikana, this body of close to 40 pen and ink drawings, […]
CROSS OUT ANY plans you may have for tomorrow, Sunday October 14. The achingly brief season of Steven Berkoff’s Metamorphosis under the direction of Alby Michaels ends on that day, and it is a production you will deeply regret if you miss it. Of the calibre of Molière’s […]
ANIMAL FARM. TWO words which conjure up a quirky engagement with political horror, as they refer to one of the more important tracts of contemporary literature. Peter Mammes, in his current exhibition, It’s Already Too Late Once the Soldiers Have Arrived, touches on the kind of wisdom and […]
IT IS NOT everyday that you find a truly South African story told with unabashed frankness in the eye of the horror of apartheid. It’s even rarer that you find one that is not only about the broad terrain of apartheid, but one which also burrows in a […]
RUPTURING AUDIENCES FOR over 130 years, the story of a privileged young woman and her magnetic attraction to a young man employed as her father’s driver, is back on the international boards, as relevant, bloody and direct as ever. Julie, penned by Polly Stenham, draws from the Strindberg […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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