SHOLEM ALEICHEM COULD do this. As could Isaac Bashevis Singer. And in the vein of great Yiddish tales told through a humble cipher, this week, you will get to hear, in Afrikaans, the work of Hendie Grobbelaar which reflects a base yet deep and rich understanding of local […]
A THRILLER WITH a twist, this week’s Afrikaans-language radio drama, Nag van die Ver Musiek offers glimpses of the ghoulies that may lurk in your dreams or your closet (or your past), but it is held together chillingly with Brahms’s lullaby – played on an old music box […]
VERY, VERY RARELY may a play cross your awareness that is so perfect in all its criss-crossing of parts and references, of loss and love and birth and possibility, that you feel completely absorbed in the characters’ lives. And you hold on to each unfolding dialogic second because […]
A LITTLE IMPROVISATION never goes amiss. Or so thinks Hermaans Potgieter when his wife leaves her almost-ready-to-bake cake for a few minutes in his bored presence. Joey van Niekerk’s Afrikaans-language radio drama Die Prys, which broadcasts this week on Radio Sonder Grense, is a sweet and conventional comedy […]
EIGHT MONTHS AGO, you may have called a story with its heart in the cruel grip of an epidemic ‘apocalyptic’. Tomorrow evening, when you listen to the radio drama interpretation of CJ Langenhoven’s novella Mof en Sy Mense, you will recognise all the rawness of loss and the […]
TAKE AN ALREADY spooky kind of atmosphere, sprinkle it with some werewolf detritus and the nuts and bolts of a conventional thriller, and you will find yourself sitting on the edge of your seat this evening, for the 90-minute long Bloedmaan, an Afrikaans-language radio drama on Radio Sonder […]
WHAT DO YOU do when your moaning pal slips in a “and might I borrow your revolver for the night?” kind of a question? If you’re Alexei Alexeyevich (Johann Nel), you lend him, instead, your ear. This is the nub of another delicious bit of Chekhov, magicked into […]
NOT EVERY WOMAN out there is a defenceless shrinking violet as cliché and politically-correct rhetoric may tell you. Take the one who bursts into the private toe-related agonies of Kistunov, a 19th century Russian curmudgeon and banker (played by Johann Nel) to beleaguer him with her own domestic […]
RADIO DRAMA REVIEW: DIE NAG VAN LEGIO. WHEN YOU GET so immersed into a radio play that you feel at once transfixed and terrified to your very core, you know that you are in the presence of real greatness — from the perspectives of writing, directing and performing. […]
REVIEW: RADIO DRAMA ‘KRAG’. WHAT ARE THE protocols of an emergency under lockdown? A little old lady, Elsa Venter (Elize Cawood) fiercely alone in her Linden flat encounters a problem big enough for her to call the emergency services, but is it big enough for them to take […]
Recent Comments