IF YOU SEE one show this festival – or maybe this lifetime – do whatever is necessary to get to see Firefly. In the tight and clear but unabashedly mad ethos that Sylvaine Strike opposite Andrew Buckland represent, this play touches on the big questions of life in […]
THERE ARE FEW things as comforting to the heart and soul as a beloved theatre chestnut, coddled by time and roasted with retelling. Radio Sonder Grense brings to its listeners a Christmas gift today, by way of a radio theatre production of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Tale. Penniegryper: […]
IN THIS AGE of social media, Wikipedia and any and every other kind of dumbing down and shallowing out of real thought, the presence of Ashraf Jamal’s anthology of art essays, published by Skira in 2017 raises a middle finger to lazy thinking, sloppy writing and weak academic […]
REVIEW: AFRIKAANS RADIO DRAMA: DIE HEKS THE 15TH CENTURY and its misogyny in Europe is legend. Iconic Afrikaans writer C Louis Leipoldt takes on the mantle worn by Umberto Eco, John Whiting and Arthur Miller in their contemplation of the phenomenon of witch burning, in a magnificent piece […]
PICTURE THE VISUAL clichés of Victorian England with all its beautiful costumes, complicated pathways and wooden buildings. While you’re doing this, don’t forget to add in its dire poverty, abject filth and propensity toward child labour. It’s a complicated series of images which this filmic team, headed by […]
Please Note: This production contains halogen lights shone directly into the audience’s eyes. IT SEEMS THAT Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol is the flavour of the season this year. There are no less than three manifestations in Johannesburg of this Victorian cautionary tale about a miser and how his […]
WHAT DO YOU do with a fine and classical tale of Christmas told in Dickensian language, if you want to add a bit of sprite to its shenanigans and a bit of verve to your audience engagement? That’s easy. You Seussify it. So says American theatre-maker Peter Bloedel […]
Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist is one of those stories that has been consumed by the children’s theatre industry, thanks in part to the eponymous West End and Broadway musicals of the 1960s featuring glorious songs by Lionel Bart. It’s also been deemed a children’s story because the main […]
Take three sisters. Clad them in severe black lace tops, white skirts and insufferable black tresses. Cast around them a vague tale of a missing father, an ever-absent black horse and tuna crumbs. And put vulgar hysteria and arbitrary cruelty into their mouths and souls, and you will […]
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