VERY, VERY RARELY may a play cross your awareness that is so perfect in all its criss-crossing of parts and references, of loss and love and birth and possibility, that you feel completely absorbed in the characters’ lives. And you hold on to each unfolding dialogic second because […]
REVIEW: AFRIKAANS RADIO PLAY, MY MENSE. A TALE OF life and death, disappointment and purple pencil crayons, Dot Serfontein’s yarn My Mense (My People) is not about great manoeuvres in socio-political injustice. It is not a big story of major seismic shifts. Rather, something like 19th century French […]
RADIO DRAMA REVIEW: FAAN’S SE TREIN. THE RIPPLES THAT an autistic diagnosis make in a society are complex and devastating. They centre on the individual, spill over into his or her loved ones and then touch the community and the society in ways sometimes supportive and at other […]
THE BEAUTIFUL UNLOGIC and earnest hyperbole of a nine-year-old in conversation with his elderly grandfather starts this deeply wrenching play about sudden loss and unspoken words. Retief Scholtz’s work Karel se Oupa, was staged a few years ago, at the Market Theatre; it’s been reworked for radio and […]
WHEN A GREAT story is told, it gathers together diverse energies, glues you to its ebbs and flows and allows you to walk away with its resonances ringing and rumbling in your heart and belly. Sometimes all it takes is a 90 minute foray into a rural landscape, […]
AN ELDERLY WOMAN is found dead in her aviary and the police are summoned to investigate. Thus begins to unfurl a mystery that will keep you leaning in to your wireless until the very end. William Oosthuizen’s gently creepy Afrikaans-language radio play with a strong moral core, Die […]
A MURDER, A suicide, a mysterious letter and a court case are the central elements of this intriguing yarn cast in the context of South African violence. Based on a true story which hit the media in 2012, Skink vir my ‘n whisky is a subtly developed Afrikaans-language […]
IF YOU COULD suspend moral and politically correct imperatives for the duration of Guy Ritchie’s 1998 comedy Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, you will absolutely relish the texture and narrative, the drama and gruff sweetness of Lee Doubell’s Afrikaans language radio drama that broadcasts on Radio Sonder […]
ANYONE WHO HAS suffered the busy indignity of having to be a waiter in a coffee shop will relate to this punchy, spicy little foray into the horror and sarcasm, the do’s and don’ts of this, one of the oldest professions in the book. More a monologue with […]
A BEAUTIFULLY CRAFTED tale of loyalty and values learned and imbibed, Dalene Matthee’s novel Die Judasbok (The Scapegoat) translates with a true sense of Klein Karoo grit into an Afrikaans-language radio drama you won’t forget in a hurry. It’s an extremely sensitive and intelligent radio-adaptation that will haunt […]
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