From a giant toothbrush to a car tyre tutu, there’s a giraffe’s torso and a box from cremated ashes: the precious, the profane all in a beautiful conglomeration. There is respect both earnest and cynical paid to deceased mothers and representations of the horror of hate that leaves you queasy.
This tale is about the women who have awaited their absent men for hundreds of years. It is also about men who go into the world to create lives for themselves, knowing – or maybe forgetting – about the domesticity born of innocent love, that waits for them in a rural place.
HOW DO YOU look back on close to six decades of incredulity at the caveats and bouquets of humour so off the wall that only politicians could have written them? Pieter-Dirk Uys’s latest theatre production, Sell-By Date, which performs at Montecasino until 10 September looks at a lifetime […]
HE’S BIG, HE’S bold and he’s got his quill-covered head on sensibly. This is Noko (Lebotho Moshoeshoe) the porcupine, a character you will love for his overriding sense of justice in a world of bullying and misunderstanding. This week, you can get to meet him and his night […]
IF YOU DIDN’T know it was true, you’d deem it unbelievable. That’s Angela Merkel’s charmed life: It fits the parameters of a classical fairy tale. Clever girl born into marginalised village grows up to see democracy happen and later to become the country’s chancellor and lead it on […]
WHERE WERE YOU when Nelson Mandela was released from prison? Who were you when human faeces were plied on one of South Africa’s most prominent public sculptures? Why aren’t you vegan? How did you react to news of the Marikana massacre in August 2017? One of the classic […]
A THEATRE OPENING event in Johannesburg never felt complete before the arrival of Des and Dawn Lindberg, arguably one of South African theatre’s First Couples. When they entered the auditorium to take their places in a production’s audience, it felt as though a precious parental blessing had been […]
WHAT WOULD MAKE a man risk his life by balancing precariously on one hand with his legs above him, on a rain-soaked ledge of a building high above a city half covered by mist? That’s what acrobat Hans Prignitz did in 1948 in Hamburg, as a favour to […]
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 […]
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 […]
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