Just when you think you know who’s hot and who’s not in contemporary dance, just when you’re catching your breath after Dance Umbrella, there comes a showcase work so utterly perfect, that all the parameters shift and you’re privileged to see the bar being raised again. Lulu Mlangeni […]
They stand in a stripped bare John Kani theatre, which allows your eye to rest on and explore the architecture that has been witness to so much drama over decades. Surrounded by more than 20 plastic crates, some apples and a couple of swaths of material, these four […]
From the moment band leader Tshepo Mngoma lets rip into his electronic violin, in the opening number Bungazani, you are convinced that this anthology of music, theatre, dance and poetry will be extraordinary. And you won’t be wrong, but Ketekang is not without decision-making flaws, which bruise its […]
With the ringing and tumbling of words and phrases over one another, this portrayal of 23-year-old Rachel Corrie, the young American activist who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003, while trying to protect a Palestinian family home from destruction, resonates with a resemblance to the Anne […]
Gogo. These two syllables, under Gcina Mhlophe’s pen in the classic South African play Have You Seen Zandile?, embrace everything that a loving, hard working grandmother is about: Vulnerable, pugnacious when necessary, and above all, capable of real love. On stage 28 years ago this astonishingly fine work […]
She might not be Jewish, but she understands how the Holocaust remains in Europe’s blood and bones. Miřenka Čechová (32) (pictured), internationally respected Czech performer and choreographer, was seven years ago so swept away by Anne Frank’s diary, that she created a work about it. “I recognise Anne […]
To reach out and catch the shadow of a bird in one’s clenched fist. That childlike yet deeply philosophical desire is central to this extraordinary little play, Fugard’s latest, which celebrates life and death as it contemplates the freedom but also the indignity of growing old. And while […]
It’s not everyday that you get the chance to see veteran actor John Kani performing on stage, and the experience of watching this ostensibly vulnerable old man with rapier-like wit and electric timing is precious. The man has a magnetic stage presence; his performance in Missing is simply […]
Something must be said for the unequivocal beauty of intelligent satire handled with such vicious acuity that it makes you laugh with glee to watch morally horrifying corruption at play. Mpho Osei-Tutu and Jerry Mntonga capture an understanding of Zakes Mda’s ‘man’ to an insightful tee, but […]
If you were white, young and English-speaking in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s in South African suburbia, you may’ve been privy to a particular lexicon of words like ‘tit’ (nice), ‘jislaaik’ (an expression of wonder), ‘kotch’ (vomit) and ‘boghouse’ (toilet). We were under cultural embargo. Apartheid was rife. […]
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