THEATRE REVIEW: RETURN OF THE ANCESTORS WITH A POTENT nod in the direction of the 1981 classic South African play, Woza Albert!, Mike van Graan’s Return of the Ancestors is a provocative essay on what has become of the world in which we exist. It offers a premise […]
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 […]
A TALE OF gentrification and blues where sex is the underlying parlance and song lifts the dialogue into a different realm, Dominique Morisseau’s Paradise Blue is an African American foray into the complexity of the future for a 1949 Detroit club owner. The production, directed by James Ngcobo […]
South African storytelling has rich veins of possibility that draw not only from farm novel traditions, but also the criss-crossing of many cultures and biases that soils its reputation, but makes for good meaty yarns. This is what you will find in Victor Gordon’s sterling work Brothers, an […]
ROUGH AND WISE words constructed around a complex and nuanced narrative and cast within the folds of metaphors and figures of speech, wickedly flipping languages up against one another, can never get old. Particularly if they are performed with a guttural perfection that is peppered with physical theatre […]
IT IS A great rarity for a theatrical work to be able to touch the nub of a complex issue that bruises a society, with potency, conviction and directness. It is even a greater rarity when the work in question is the product of unseasoned performers. And while […]
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 COMPLEX AND oft blood-stained plight of people with sexual proclivities that digress from hetero-norms has waxed and waned for centuries all over the world. Queer people have alternatively been persecuted, raped, murdered and deemed illegal in society, as they have been embraced and lionised, before the circle […]
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 […]
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 […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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