A TALE OF politics and love, betrayal and death, Verdi’s opera Aïda, composed in 1870, is arguably one of the opera genre’s most known works. Indeed, it’s probably the repository for the most famous ensembles, tunes that you can whistle on your way to the theatre in […]
ARE YOU — OR your children – simply bored with European fairy tales with all their pomp and circumstance, and men in Victorian-redolent powdered wigs and stockings with funny shoes, populating stories that have been told a million times and present platitudes at their most bland? Well, you […]
THE WELSH VILLAGE of Aberfan in October of 1966 weathered a catastrophe worse than anyone could have imagined. At 09:15 in the morning of an otherwise ordinary but wet day, a colliery spoil tip slid down the mountain and drowned a primary school in a 12m-deep avalanche of […]
FROM THE VERY first spider web exquisitely filmed cast against the light, you understand some of the basic premises of this story. From the first moment you see Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), a young teenager living with her dad, Will (Ben Foster) in the great outdoors, you understand that […]
WHEN SOMEONE LOOKS okay, you can’t always tell that they’re not. This is the central premise to Australian playwright David Williamson’s recent play Odd Man Out, currently on the boards in Johannesburg. It’s a work which is not only brilliantly conceived of and written, but it is one […]
WELCOME TO CLUB D, where everyone has a heart that is a little bit broken. This is the thread that runs through this sweet revue of songs and divorce repartee with acapello wiz, who you might remember from Not The Midnight Mass, Alan Glass and Cat Simoni, with […]
THEY’RE THERE, CONFRONTING you in the audience before curtain up in a polite and distinctly standoffish way, giving off love/hate hospitality vibes like only the British can do. He with his Bryl-cremed hair and moustache and awkward physicality. She with her guttural monotone guffaw, her frowzy wig and […]
IT WAS APARTHEID’S jester Pieter-Dirk Uys who some years ago famously cited the shenanigans of the state as being the best possible script writers for his work. He wasn’t alone. Playwright Mike van Graan doesn’t miss a beat in using every dirty nuance and crass irony dished out […]
IT’S EASY TO get emotionally entwined in the harsh finger-pointing that sees the elderly of a community abandoned. It makes for predictable storytelling and indictments on the callousness of the younger generation. What is more difficult is representing the other side of a story that is about rejection […]
“HAVE YOU SEEN Green Man Flashing?” was a statement uttered with urgency everywhere you went in 2004/5. It was a play that rocked South African society’s equilibrium when it first saw light of day. One of the first works from the pen of Mike van Graan, it fitted the […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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