THE BEAUTIFUL UNLOGIC and earnest hyperbole of a nine-year-old in conversation with his elderly grandfather starts this deeply wrenching play about sudden loss and unspoken words. Retief Scholtz’s work Karel se Oupa, was staged a few years ago, at the Market Theatre; it’s been reworked for radio and […]
HORROR STORIES OF interfering in-laws, told with earnestness and wit are so well trodden that they’ve become a cliché all of their own and there are a range of memes on the internet which describe them, both with humour and bitterness. Indeed, it’s seldom that a young couple […]
WHEN A GREAT story is told, it gathers together diverse energies, glues you to its ebbs and flows and allows you to walk away with its resonances ringing and rumbling in your heart and belly. Sometimes all it takes is a 90 minute foray into a rural landscape, […]
ISSUES OF BRAVERY and selflessness in 1300s Europe, with all its rivalry and gallantry, come under the loupe in Radio Sonder Grense’s weekly Afrikaans-language radio play this week. It’s an interpretation of Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 play Wilhelm Tell, and translated into the Afrikaans and featuring lots of nips […]
SOMETIMES ANGELS COME in rude shapes but at the right time in your life. And sometimes you have the perspective and wisdom to recognise them. Anders Geveer is a beautifully crafted Afrikaans-language radio play about the differences that make us human. It’s written by Sophia van Taak and […]
YOU SHOULD NEVER look a gift horse in the mouth, they say. And sometimes that gift horse comes in a surprising form. In Die Selle, this week’s Afrikaans-language radio drama, which airs on Thursday night, Magda Retief (Karen Wessels) is a woman who lives on a South African […]
IF YOU HAVE been privileged to have been raised by people with a long history of a complicated relationship with things, you will relate well to the gentle, empathetic and sometimes feisty humour bordering on pathos that characterises Esta Steyn’s gem of an Afrikaans-language radio play this week […]
SOMETIMES IT TAKES a fresh young voice to rejuvenate an old chestnut in ways you couldn’t have imagined. Anna Greenfield’s Afrikaans language radio drama Liewe Pynappel debuted this evening on Radio Sonder Grense. It’s a gentle tale of pregnancy and love, in that order, with a little feisty […]
THERE IS ALWAYS time for schmaltzy love stories, particularly when they are beautifully crafted and resonate with so many values that give you an understanding of what love is all about. Wessel Pretorius’s delicate RSG Afrikaans-language radio play Mike en Mavis ticks all these boxes, within a Casablanca […]
WHAT WOULD YOU say to your only sibling if you knew you were dying? This week’s sensitively crafted Afrikaans-language radio play is a tale of sibling love, disappointment, and making good in the precious time one is allotted. Premised on the marriage idiom that every pot has a […]
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