YOU NEED TO quietly gather your sensibilities when you find yourself in the presence of sheer perfection. Several decades ago, theatre practitioner Margot Luyt directed Peter Shaffer’s enormous Mozartian play, Amadeus. It had been translated into Afrikaans and reworked for radio by Nerina Ferreira. This completely flawless rendition […]
FILM REVIEW: AMADEUS AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE. THE CURIOUS FLAW in this almost mythic tale of maverick talent, jealousy and the celebration of mediocrity, is how it is hinged on ostensible fact. Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus took some fuzzy hearsay around the life and death of 18th […]
THEATRE REVIEW: BRETT BAILEY’S MACBETH. YOU MAY HAVE seen many productions of the Bard’s most violent tale of the catastrophe and tragedy of unbridled ambition, in your personal theatre-watching history. You may even feel a little blasé about the head counts and the blood spilled in this story. […]
FILM REVIEW: CORIOLANUS. THE UNCOMFORTABLE MYTH which sees a greatly loved hero get vilified and banished with the ebbs and flows of societal energies is one of the streams of narrative that infuses Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. But like his works of the ilk of King Lear, there is so […]
FILM REVIEW: A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. THE ROLE OF Blanche du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire has, since 1947 when Tennessee Williams first penned it, become iconic as a reflection of the tawdry vulnerability and bravado of a character losing her moorings, while she pretends to be […]
FILM REVIEW: THE BARBERSHOP CHRONICLES. WHERE IS IT that African men get to kick back, let their hair down and loosen their tongues? The communal urinal? The local bar? Under the pen of Inua Ellams, it’s the barbershop; South African writers of the ilk of Tony Miyambo, Sue […]
FILM REVIEW: FRANKENSTEIN. This review is premised on the version of the work with Jonny Lee Miller as the creature. A man makes a living creature by pulling together alchemical possibilities and graveyard detritus sewn together with a crude hand. And thus starts one of the western world’s […]
THEATRE REVIEW: TWELFTH NIGHT Humour is easily one of the most difficult genres to uphold: it dates; what may have been pants-wettingly hilarious in the 1500s, might be simply boring or perplexing today. In the hands of Simon Godwin, however, the gender fluid wildness of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth […]
THEATRE REVIEW: TREASURE ISLAND. PATSY FERRAN IS a Spanish-born actor, who at the time of the stage debut of the National Theatre’s Treasure Island was in her early 20s. The enormity of her presence, the wit and poetry of the manner in which she articulates and inhabits the […]
THEATRE REVIEW: JANE EYRE. IF YOU’VE REACHED the point of misremembering the magic of theatre, having not seen anything live and outstanding since lockdown was declared a couple of weeks ago, look no further. Sally Cookson’s whopping three hour long production of Charlotte Brontë’s great 1847 classic Jane […]
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