In terms of power she wields both as a character and a performer, Mpume Mthombeni as Nomsa is God in a pair of 1950s-evocative horn-rimmed specs and a dress appropriate to a middle-aged woman. She carries the world on her head and can invoke humility or catastrophe with a gesture.
‘God’s work’ is a film about ghosts and trains and broken promises. Of a brother eternally a child in the initiate’s white clay. Of a drug lord with a machete called Verwoerd, and a vast room of the dead. Of a woman who has waited one year for a train.
The story paints a hopscotch series of leaps between 1880 and the present, in the light of rhino poaching, trophy hunting, illegal aliens and other such crimes, often leaving you on one cliff’s edge as a chapter ends, and finding you on another, 100 years later, as the next begins.
It is a long play, but such is the storytelling acumen and the passionate focus of Mthombeni, that as she begins, you completely lose yourself in its hairpin interstices. You become a molecule in a story which is at once horrifying and messy, tragic and cruel, yet beautiful and mythical.
Nicholas Wilcox endowed so many of his students with an unforgettable understanding of the value of play and of the complex freedom to fail. He showed youngsters how to embrace the absurd and chaotic in a world that could be cerebral and cruel as it could be beautiful and rich.
When Cavaradossi (Freddie de Tommaso), having been tortured emerges full of love for Tosca, his aria ‘E lucevan de stelle’, a declaration of his undying belief in her, will melt you. You know this song even if you don’t. And what De Tommaso does with it, will may you cry.
IT IS NOT every day that an artist’s work can be contained by the conventional genres of still life, portraits and abstraction, but also by another almost invented genre: ‘Rembrandt’. The painter and arts writer, Marianne Meijer enjoyed a lifetime-long love affair with Rembrandt’s work, which brought darkness […]
LET’S FACE IT: we all need a beautiful page turner, that sets us on fire and gives us something potent to come home to. This is Craig Higginson’s 2023 novel, The Ghost of Sam Webster. And yes, it’s a thriller, but there’s depth to it which is about […]
IN A SACRED circle painted on the grass of the Hilton College campus, real magic takes place in the hands of Andile Vilakazi and Sbusiso Mhlongo. It’s the kind of magic that will not only affect your thinking about the pecking order of the gods that rule this […]
WHEN YOU LOOK at – or remember – footage of Lindiwe Ndlovu, be it in the context of the terrifying ‘Sharon’ in the prison series Lockdown, ‘Sponono’, an ex-convict with her convictions close to her heart in Zabalaza, the inimitable ‘Patjutju’ in Uzalo among other characters, you see […]
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