Tag: Cape Town

Kicks and pricks in the classroom

MUSICAL TALES THAT wag a finger or six at values which keep young blood closeted in ignorance have a danger of warming the cockles of the heart even before the curtain rises. Sylvaine Strike’s adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s establishment-rattling work Spring Awakening which was only first performed some […]

Tricks and balances

GENTRIFICATION. IT’S AN issue you cannot be passive about, particularly if you have axes to grind and stakes you’ve planted in the decaying area under question. Brent Palmer’s play King George takes on the behemoth of city life in all its glory and shabbiness, and he wins. It’s […]

Ode to the Patron Saint of Mediocrity

WHEN YOU THINK of Amadeus, Peter Shaffer’s perfectly wonderful play of 1979 that cast mischievous light into the mysterious nooks and untold crannies of the life of 18th century Vienna composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the first thing that comes to mind is the music, that Confutatis from Mozart’s […]

Dance me to the edge of time

IT WAS THE late Alan Crump, Chairman of the National Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown, during the 1990s, who used to quip about the so-called “blue rinse and boiling sweet brigade”, who the festival organisers had to take seriously because they represented a money backbone of the […]

Goodies and Baddies

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 […]

Eat together, stick together

WAR PRESENTS CASUALTIES on levels far wider than the conventional battle fields. There is the horror of a lack of closure, relentless vulnerability and ripples of hatred spewed in so many directions, conjoined as it often is, with ignorance. In The Old Oak, director Ken Loach takes on […]

Powder keg in the classroom

OVER THE LAST few years, our social world has become so painstakingly aware of the possibility of offending others, that something has been lost in our ability to be candid. This sensitive nerve in contemporary society is explored excruciatingly in The Teachers’ Lounge featuring Leonie Benesch. It’s on […]

Pretty little Mother Earth

TOSS TOGETHER THE notion of undisguised good and evil, with a bit of lumpen docility in between; the forces of nature with those of easily corruptible and gullible humanity, blend it with hard-boiled yet utterly gorgeous computer-generated animation and a traditional Ukrainian and Slavic legend and you have […]

We plan. God laughs

OUR LIVES ARE replete with things that happen for reasons we don’t know. Things force our plans to change. Sudden news changes what constitutes our identity. We don’t really know what causes what, and why. Even though, in our hubris, we think we do. The Romanian film Mikado, […]

Caged birds who will not sing

VIOLENT POLITICAL CONFLICT is always the ideal setting for very complex emotional tales of love and trauma. Mohamed Kordorfani’s first foray into film direction offers a clear and convoluted path of friendship between two women. It’s called Goodbye Julia and is the opening film for this year’s European […]