Tag: Pretoria

Chekhov to the max

WHAT IS IT about Chekhov that makes us relate so beautifully to his characters that we can be unbridled in our laughter, cringes and agony of recognition at their psychological turmoil and suffocating family closeness? Director Sam Yates and writer Simon Stephens have cooked up a fresh and […]

To that box of photos that got lost

IN HIS EXQUISITE 2008 tractate on death and dying, English writer Julian Barnes comments that just as every writer will have a last reader, so every grave will have a last visitor. South African artist Maria Pienaar takes this profound reflection a step further, contemplating the last viewer […]

Goodies and Baddies

SHE SAID, HE said and the vulnerable young woman servant without a voice hasn’t a chance in a context where she can be labelled one thing and hung for it. Push anyone far and ruthlessly enough with the threat of their worst fears at the price of their […]

Narcissists and sucker punches

THE RUSH AND thrust of politics can date very easily. Particularly within the ambit of a staged play. In the hands of the makers of James Graham’s Best of Enemies, however, the political narrative surges with lifeblood that is timeless. The public conversation that is the focus of […]

Mary Cassatt: Excellence on its own terms

SHE WAS A feminist before it was fashionable, a French Impressionist born in Pennsylvania, a woman painter in a man’s world. She took intaglio printmaking by the horns and created arguably one of the world’s most valuable collections of images. This was Mary Cassatt. Her story Mary Cassatt: […]

Something to hold on to

SOMETIMES MAGIC LURKS in an association between an established art gallery, the vagaries age and the possibilities that thinking out of the box can yield. For just a couple more days, the SA Association of Arts in Pretoria hosts a rather extraordinary little contemplation on what it means […]

No place like home

IT IS NOT every day that a story has the potency to leap off the page and into the rhythms of your heartbeat, regardless of how it has been written or presented. Estelle Neethling has experience as a writer of profiles, not books. But when Adolphine Misekabu crossed […]

Lessons in Being There: RIP Shirley Sacks

“BE READY FOR anything. Expect nothing!” was one of the unforgettable pearls offered by thespian Shirley Sacks to generations of performance students over a 33-year teaching career at the Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria. Teaching in the creative arts is unquestionably a vocational blessing of the highest […]