HOW DO YOU look back on close to six decades of incredulity at the caveats and bouquets of humour so off the wall that only politicians could have written them? Pieter-Dirk Uys’s latest theatre production, Sell-By Date, which performs at Montecasino until 10 September looks at a lifetime […]
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 […]
THERE’S SOMETHING RICHLY poignant about the glitz and perfume of a vibrant theatre industry that we once loved deeply and maybe took for granted. There’s something terrifying about a society in lockdown which allows its art freelancers to be tossed under the proverbial bus, many of them with […]
ART REVIEW: LOVE IS A DANGEROUS DRUG HOW DO YOU tell the story of a complicated life in a way that visitors to an exhibition can access, empathise with and take something away from, without detracting from your story? You have their attention for a fleeting 30 minutes, […]
THE QUEEN IS dead. Long live the queen. So begins Pieter-Dirk Uys’s current foray into the shenanigans and hypocrisies that have been the Vaseline of South African political intercourse for the last 40 years, and #HeTwo does the unthinkable. Uys, in his 70s, continues to ratchet up the […]
IT WAS A music teacher in the early youth of composer Hans Roosenschoon (pictured) who suggested the boy write music for piano, instead of take the conventional route of mastering the instrument first. “I think it was out of desperation,” says Roosenschoon, this year’s composer-in-residence for the Johannesburg […]
SHELVE YOUR CYNICISM! The People’s Theatre in Johannesburg presents a no-holds-barred Beauty and the Beast JR, which takes all the schlock and cliché necessary and mushes it together to form a fairy tale of the very finest stripe. Without any irrelevant pantomimish asides, without any lewd jokes for […]
WELCOME TO AFRICA! It’s a place of safari and godliness. It’s a context where the wily rabbit is often more sophisticated in his thinking than the beautiful leopard, and it’s a place where things die and are reborn. Jill Girard and Keith Smith bring you a compendium of […]
BEAUFORT WEST. A Western Cape town that like many others in the dusty interior of South Africa, is one that 21st values seem to have left behind. It’s dry in so many ways, and prospects of life for a 24-year-old who is in the ignominious situation of being […]
AS THE FIRST trumpet cadence sounds, of the Annie theme song, before the curtains open, the children in the audience hush in anticipation, jiving in their seats as the jazzy showbiz magic of the tune takes over. Directed by Jill Girard and Keith Smith and featuring the astonishing […]
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