On a level, Micaela Jade Tucker’s one-woman play is an advocacy piece about taking care of a woman’s body, with all its tendencies to pick up judgement, viruses and other things. It’s about broken condoms, reeling ideas in and taking responsibility for who you think you are in the world.
Pillowman darkly brings together very difficult moral values. Without a clear sense of political context, the work is like a conventional police whodunnit with a good cop/bad cop motif. It’s also like an expose of a dictatorial regime. And finally it confronts Jewish and Chinese identity, mental disability and murder.
In the hands of one of South African theatre’s dream teams, this is a gem of a work. Job Kubatsi and Lebohang Motaung, in minor roles, give life to the bitter jokes that lubricated black society during the darkest days of apartheid, reminiscent of the bleak humour in Dostoevsky’s novels.
HOW DO YOU give fresh life to a biography that has been told millions of times before? If you are Amanda Bothma, Kerry Hiles and Luke Holder, and the biography in question is that of the great Judy Garland, you immerse yourself into the very fabric of that […]
THE ROLLICKING CLICHES surrounding stories of love: love found, love cherished, love betrayed, love lost, is something central to who we are as human beings. So central that the idea might make you yawn a bit. The telling of tales of love have always begged for a mix […]
SOMETHING HAS TO be said about the value of sheer fresh, spoof-driven comedy which tosses industry in-jokes in the air as liberally as it does asides from movies, and in which the cast have as much fun – or more – as you do, in the audience. Throw […]
WHAT ARE YOU wearing right now? Does it pinch and bunch, ride and give you a pain where it shouldn’t? Does it make you feel like a million dollars, nevertheless? Or does it feel delicious but whatever you do, don’t catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror, […]
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT a man at the tail end of a long career, who holds tight to his dignity and even tighter to his broken dreams. It’s a quality as much about tragedy and heroism as it is about vulnerability, and in the central role of John Kani’s […]
VICIOUSNESS IS OFT a convenient veil to wear in the face of extreme anguish. Playwright Simon Woods takes a rich and complex understanding of social values and their tipping points in his extraordinary play, Hansard. Coupled with incisive direction by Robert Whitehead and a give-and-take performance by Fiona […]
ARE YOU — OR your children – simply bored with European fairy tales with all their pomp and circumstance, and men in Victorian-redolent powdered wigs and stockings with funny shoes, populating stories that have been told a million times and present platitudes at their most bland? Well, you […]
Recent Comments