VICIOUSNESS IS OFT a convenient veil to wear in the face of extreme anguish. Playwright Simon Woods takes a rich and complex understanding of social values and their tipping points in his extraordinary play, Hansard. Coupled with incisive direction by Robert Whitehead and a give-and-take performance by Fiona […]
IT’S BEEN DEEMED one of Netflix’s most watched productions, and has been followed by a slew of vehement critical opinions, both for and against, but does this mean it’s a good film? Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up is an engaging satire about the imminent end of the world […]
IT TAKES A tremendous amount of skill and wisdom – as well as, of course, courage – to be able to tear and resew the traditional fabric of a novel and turn it inside out, tossing convention to the ether. Will, the passenger delaying flight …, may well […]
FILM REVIEW: MOFFIE HOWEVER MUCH OF the horror and cruelty you may think you will experience in Oliver Hermanus’s Moffie, there will be more. This searingly important testimony to the obscenity of South African apartheid is riddled with the kind of truisms that will make you wish to […]
IF YOU HAVE ever lost someone you loved very deeply, you will know the surreal madness that makes you see your loved one amongst strangers in the street, in traffic, in the shape of a head, a distinctive movement of an arbitrary stranger. You will remember how the ridiculous […]
HOW BEST DO you tell a story sullied and broken by trauma? Do you blurt it all out in one brutal shriek? Or do you give it context and framework? Do you make it circuitous? And funny? Joseph Heller did it. Alan Bleasdale did it. As did Luigi Pirandello. […]
What is it that makes a theatre director muddy his own clarity of thought and compromise something utterly wise and moving, with quick and nasty literal gimmicks? Matsemela Manaka’s Egoli, first published in 1980, is a powerful paean to manhood and the collective challenges it faces, but this […]
Very occasionally there comes a play which confronts an era from the inside out, with both a sense of empathy and one of hard-edged objectivity, with as complete and yet vulnerable an understanding of how riddled with complexity a given issue can be. Even more occasionally, do you […]
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