SHE SAID, HE said and the vulnerable young woman servant without a voice hasn’t a chance in a context where she can be labelled one thing and hung for it. Push anyone far and ruthlessly enough with the threat of their worst fears at the price of their […]
TAKE THE GENRE of the South African farm novel, throw it in the air with all its idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies, violence and violation, broken promises and trashed dreams, and a great contemporary South African classic is born. Take the work on stage, and a different kind of magic […]
FORTY-ONE YEARS AGO, Paul Slabolepszy’s play Saturday Night at the Palace rocked the theatre-going sensibilities of South Africa. This was art so close to the mirror that it reeked and terrified. It’s enjoying a season currently at the Joburg Theatre, under the direction of Albert Maritz and it […]
THE DREADED PARKTOWN Prawn. During the late 1980s in South Africa, it was the ugliest thing you could imagine, wherever in the political spectrum you were. It was a cricket, essentially, but very big and thorny of leg. It was orange and black in body and built like […]
ONE OF THE ingredients necessary in every generation is a voice of fire. Particularly if it is a generation beset by hurt. Sandile Dikeni had that inimitable quality. A poet, an arts editor and a man of words who originated in a thirsty Karoo hamlet in an apartheid-stained […]
Take an old and revolting story of disrespect and abuse, of entrenched behaviour and broken dreams. Put it into the mouth and sensibilities of young filmmakers and you may find yourself in the presence of an unexpected bit of pure poetry. This is what you can anticipate in […]
WHEN YOU WATCH a small child being exposed to the magic of theatre, you can believe in anything. Joyce Levinsohn, one of Johannesburg’s children’s theatre pioneers, understood this magic and this ability to believe, from the inside out. The founder of the city’s oldest traditional children’s theatre, she […]
Researched by Robyn Jordaan COMPLETE WITH HER freshly applied lipstick and her internal fierceness in the face of the ordinary, Christine Basson shied from the light of media sensationalism, but had the temerity to take on some of South African theatre’s most controversial roles luminously. She raised a […]
THE DIRTY IDEOLOGY of apartheid was enforced on many levels. It saw the ignominious burial of grotesque secrets. Some more deeply than others. Indeed some of those secrets were never sufficiently exhumed for general access, not at the time, not during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and not […]
WHAT WOULD MAKE a man risk his life by balancing precariously on one hand with his legs above him, on a rain-soaked ledge of a building high above a city half covered by mist? That’s what acrobat Hans Prignitz did in 1948 in Hamburg, as a favour to […]
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