THE RITUAL OF watching a film in a darkened auditorium, on plush seats as we munch popcorn and cold drink is something that has been endemic to our culture for decades. It’s a moment of escapism, in which you can see dreams come true and watch magic happen. […]
FEELING JADED BY all the sham, fake news and broken dreams that this world is dishing out to all of us right now? Well, there may be an antidote. Scholars and sociologists of the ilk of Rudolf Steiner, Joseph Campbell and others drew their threads of belief out […]
IT IS THE 1960s, the time of the border war that saw the South African Police head to head with cadres of SWAPO, in what is today Namibia. Simon (Dawid Minnaar) and his wife Mia (Gretha Brazelle) are fugitives on the road to safer, less war-torn pastures in […]
HOLIDAY TIME BECKONS and a young white South African family comprising two little girls, a teenaged son and their parents are readying themselves for their annual seaside vacation. Bessie (Simonè Benjamin) is but 19. She’s brown. And she’s employed as the family’s nanny. And she’s never seen the […]
THE BEAUTIFUL UNLOGIC and earnest hyperbole of a nine-year-old in conversation with his elderly grandfather starts this deeply wrenching play about sudden loss and unspoken words. Retief Scholtz’s work Karel se Oupa, was staged a few years ago, at the Market Theatre; it’s been reworked for radio and […]
HORROR STORIES OF interfering in-laws, told with earnestness and wit are so well trodden that they’ve become a cliché all of their own and there are a range of memes on the internet which describe them, both with humour and bitterness. Indeed, it’s seldom that a young couple […]
WHEN A GREAT story is told, it gathers together diverse energies, glues you to its ebbs and flows and allows you to walk away with its resonances ringing and rumbling in your heart and belly. Sometimes all it takes is a 90 minute foray into a rural landscape, […]
SOMETIMES ANGELS COME in rude shapes but at the right time in your life. And sometimes you have the perspective and wisdom to recognise them. Anders Geveer is a beautifully crafted Afrikaans-language radio play about the differences that make us human. It’s written by Sophia van Taak and […]
YOU SHOULD NEVER look a gift horse in the mouth, they say. And sometimes that gift horse comes in a surprising form. In Die Selle, this week’s Afrikaans-language radio drama, which airs on Thursday night, Magda Retief (Karen Wessels) is a woman who lives on a South African […]
IF YOU HAVE been privileged to have been raised by people with a long history of a complicated relationship with things, you will relate well to the gentle, empathetic and sometimes feisty humour bordering on pathos that characterises Esta Steyn’s gem of an Afrikaans-language radio play this week […]
Recent Comments