WHEN A CAST of performers is able to wrench an experienced audience member from guffaws of unrestrainable mirth to real tears of sadness with the flick of a wrist – as life itself can do – you know you are in safe hands. Based on the biblical tale […]
PLEASE BE WARNED: STROBE LIGHTS ARE USED IN THIS PRODUCTION! WHEN YOU ENTER the sacred confines of a new work which you’ve yet to experience and the front of house staff issue you with ear plugs along with your tickets, be afraid, be very afraid. Flemish choreographer Jan […]
WHERE THERE IS smoke in a story involving powerful figures, there is always fire. And the story that wriggles its way out into the public forum is often a cover from one much more sordid and filthy than the public should be allowed to know or can stomach. […]
By Geoff Sifrin GIVEN HIS HISTORY, one doesn’t want to give former president Jacob Zuma credit for anything at all, but you must admit he can dance, with his trademark chuckle. The nation watched horrified for a decade as he boogied on the deck of the South African […]
IF A PLAY finds you googling for information, or better still, scrabbling amongst your bookshelves after you’ve seen it, it must have done something right. Congo: The Trial of King Leopold II has a fabulous cast and premises rich with dangerous and interesting promise, that points in the […]
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 […]
SHE WAS NOBODY. That is, until she met and married mining magnate Sir Lionel Phillips, and gave life to the possibility of the Johannesburg Art Gallery – amongst other things – which became central to much of her life’s ambition. Lady Florence Phillips is an icon in historical […]
WHAT ARE FRIENDS for if we cannot lean on them? Brainstorming the notion across a myriad of popular songs, Sometimes I have to lean in … is a sheer gem of a work featuring two dance veterans who do not have dancers’ bodies any longer. It’s a work […]
WHEN A WORK touches you so deeply that elements in its direction have become part of how you see and speak about the world, you know that something’s been done right. In 2006, James Ngcobo directed the stage version of Es’kia Mphahlele’s tragic and beautiful tale The Suitcase. […]
IRISH WRITER COLM Tóibín did it with the Testament of Mary. As did Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis with The Last Temptation of Christ. South African-born playwright Matthew Hurt steps into this hallowed terrain in taking one of western culture’s most known biblical tales and splaying it out in […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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