Tag: Pieter Toerien

You’re the strychnine in my coffee

In ‘Black Coffee’, everything, from a complete colour wheel of deadliest poison, to the toby jug in the room, to the sub-plot of secret plans for a bomb, not to forget the costumes and pin curls of the era, is perfectly handled. This is a well-made play at its best.

Stern alarums; merry meetings

‘Bitter Winter’ happens in a waiting room. It’s about apartheid and the shifting of the world from analogue to digital. It’s about how tightly one holds onto one’s embarrassing and life-forming secrets as it is about being in the same proverbial boat as another actor, regardless of age or experience.

The boy with the courage to gallop

SOMETIMES A STORY emblazons itself on one’s memory and sensibilities and stays caught in one’s sense of self, forever. The premises of Peter Shaffer’s devastatingly unusual 1973 play Equus, was to haunt millions. This was a tale as much about conventions as it was about the fierce energy […]

Murder, most hilarious

SOMETIMES IT TAKES a brilliantly constructed and superbly rendered farce to make you not only crack a smile but guffaw from the belly in a way that gets the endorphins flowing. This is the kind of thing you can expect from the current production of The Play that […]

Where music seeds get sown

CLASSICAL MUSIC IS not necessarily something that the average child imbibes with their mother’s milk. Serious composers of the ilk of Benjamin Britten, Camille Saint-Saëns and Sergei Prokofiev, amongst others, were proactive in their day, addressing this scenario, in ways that filtered boldness and magic, humour and fantasy […]