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.
With all of its apparent chaos, the story lines in Daniel Buckland’s Afropocalypse are crystal clear and the surreal topsy-turvy values articulated from the idea of an African apocalypse are held sacred and gorgeous. And not a little scary, at times. Be prepared to give tears and laughter on cue.
Replete with cruelty, nakedness, burning incense and song that will reach into the very chambers of your heart, ‘The Black Circus and the Republic of Bantu’ is much more of a ritual than a spectacle. You emerge from the experience with a seismic sense in your gut. Something has happened.
WE LIVE IN a world that would be unrecognisable to anyone of a previous generation. It’s a world where spite and malice can have legs that last forever and a tail that can destroy lives. Indeed, it’s a world where a silly gag can land a child with […]
THREE YOUNG SOUTH African men with fabulous repartee and a bag of psychological issues are what you will encounter in this brand new gem of local theatre. The Kings of the World is a play effectively about nothing: crumbling dreams, cloudy suppositions, silly beliefs and thin promises. Constructed […]
THE PLIGHT OF melanin-deficient people came under the medical marketing spotlight in South Africa through the month of September, which made the brief staging of Arthur Molepo’s contemplation on albinism Mama, I want the black that you are, particularly prescient. It’s a complicated work told with a hand […]
THE NAUSEATING CLASH of religious dogmaticism and sexualities which contradict hetero-norms is not something new. If you look at the issue of sexuality more broadly and infuse it with an historical glance at the culture and persecution of so-called witches, it simmers and seethes there too. Young playwright […]
ZANE MEAS ADORES everything about South African writer Chris van Wyk. It’s about the cunning and oft self-deprecating magic of being Coloured in a world that doesn’t consider you black enough or white enough. It’s about the chalky memories of racism and the mixed up words and opaque […]
THE SAD THING about living in this society, tainted as it is by political rhetoric, is that after having weathered the kind of circumstances which saw our former president Jacob Zuma use hundreds of millions of tax payers’ rands to create his own personal luxury compound – among […]
FORCING HILL-BILLY VALUES under the loupe and lasso of cowboy energy, Sam Shepard’s 1980s play, Fool for Love offers a raging and meaty reflection on broken love in a grubby world of lies, taboos and indiscretions. Director Janice Honeyman takes the project by its heart, and Kate Liquorish […]
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