PICTURE THE FAMOUS bit of Western classical musical composed in 1928 by Maurice Ravel and called Boléro translated into raw sobs. Picture a professional mourner at a cemetery and a cast of close to 40 in costumes magicked to life by Black Coffee. Picture it all against a […]
WARNING: THIS SHOW FEATURES THE USE OF STROBE LIGHTS IF YOU ARE complacent about feeding your youngsters a hefty uncritical dose of colonial platitudes, dished out by adult performers dressed in furry onesies, look no further. With lashings of strobes, pepperings of shrieks and frantic chases around the […]
PLEASE BE WARNED: STROBE LIGHTS ARE USED IN THIS PRODUCTION! TAKE A LOOK at the world around you. Every inch of everything you glance at is striving for your attention, be it in the form of social media or marketing or beggars in the street, touting their misery. […]
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 […]
WHEN A MAN comes on stage just before a heavily touted show starts, to announce his great respect for all the people performing here because no one is earning money for doing so, is this a thing you’re meant to clap about? There is a huge problem in […]
THERE ARE SO many “wow” moments in the South African stage version of The Color Purple: The Musical, you’ve got to hold onto your seat with both hands. Supported by a set that features diagrammatic representation of space and texture, a cast that sparkles with magnificent voices and […]
THE DELICIOUS PRESCIENCE of a bit of Brecht in Johannesburg this month, in the wake of the start of the #ZumaMustFall movement cannot be understated, and this complex, political, thoughtful and challenging extrapolation on the surreal humour of injustice and Solomonic solutions in The Caucasian Chalk Circle hits the […]
IT TAKES SPECIAL skill to tease open one of theatre and literature’s greatest works and to reinvent it. It takes even more special skill and creative bravery to be able to produce a work on stage that has been produced on myriads of other stages all over the world […]
INDEED, THE SILLY season is already upon us. But silly is as silly does and when the volume and strobes in an auditorium are ramped up to deafen and blind an audience in order to compensate for a messy hodge-podge of a story featuring political- and market-related humour […]
A MAN STANDS on an otherwise empty stage. He wears pajama pants under a jacket, a children’s party hat on his head. And an expression of utter perplexity on his face. Thus begins Eva Mazza’s play Acceptance, an essay on the what ifs surrounding the tough monstrosity of contemporary […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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