With an energy that evokes Jenna Ortega, the performer who took on Wednesday Addams and turned her from a cameo into a series, and an ownership of a beautiful text evocative of the presence Cara Roberts casts over The King of Broken Things, Crafford-Lazarus becomes Olivia, the girl in question.
Replete with cruelty, nakedness, burning incense and song that will reach into the very chambers of your heart, ‘The Black Circus and the Republic of Bantu’ is much more of a ritual than a spectacle. You emerge from the experience with a seismic sense in your gut. Something has happened.
Malo is a tale about a clown with heart, a ringmaster with a whip and a moon with a maiden in it. It’s about love – love gained, love lost and love gossiped about on a celestial journey peppered with strong-man tactics, fire eating, Honeymanesque puns and lots of aerial dancing.
‘Master Harold’ is about the love and the shame and the hate that gets rolled into one messy stream of anger in the face of caring for a broken parent. And it is about the way in which a primal gesture can so sully a conversation that it annuls it.
Life, death, betrayal and the heaviness of loss were brought onstage to Johannesburg high school students in the form of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Armed with pure use of period language, a deep understanding of purpose and meaning and a rich clarity of narrative, they were perfect.
While LaFarge’s immersive book ‘Sting in the Tale’ (Doppelhouse Press 2021) doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive; it splits the fabric of what truth means when you are making art and allows this idea to stretch wide. Wider than you can believe. It challenges the values of education and truth. Scrumptiously.
In Mike van Graan’s ‘The Good White’, the pieces are all in place for an explosive denouement. Add a bit of protest performance, the demon of gender-based violence, and some shenanigans in the wrong bedroom, and you get the picture: It’s a scenario tense with energy and brittle with distrust.
Based on a snippet from the New Testament, involving the relationship between Herod’s step-daughter and the powers that be, Salome features Yochanaan (John the Baptist), played by Peter Mattei in excruciating scenes touching on cruelty and madness, with a touch of necrophilia and nuances of child sexuality in the mix.
Prowse’s career was remarkable. She canoodled with the biggest names in the biz, but she gave blood, sweat and tears to her craft in hefty doses and her niece does her proud in not oohing and aahing with platitudes, but in giving an exceptional life feasibility without rendering Prowse godlike.
In ‘Black Coffee’, everything, from a complete colour wheel of deadliest poison, to the toby jug in the room, to the sub-plot of secret plans for a bomb, not to forget the costumes and pin curls of the era, is perfectly handled. This is a well-made play at its best.
ansunecilliers
beckkglass
Chester Miggels
Gillian Rennie
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erinventer02
Geoff Sifrin
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henricopg
huibrechtdehart
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Kapisha Ramraj
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matthewvanderwalt
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olgalouiselemmer
Palesa Moore
Peta Kaplan
Robyn Sassen
Saleemah Shaik
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Willem Pieter
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