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Tag: Retief Scholtz

Paean to an African hairdo

FILM REVIEW: THE BARBERSHOP CHRONICLES. WHERE IS IT that African men get to kick back, let their hair down and loosen their tongues? The communal urinal? The local bar? Under the pen of Inua Ellams, it’s the barbershop; South African writers of the ilk of Tony Miyambo, Sue […]

Pour me another

ROUGH AND WISE words constructed around a complex and nuanced narrative and cast within the folds of metaphors and figures of speech, wickedly flipping languages up against one another, can never get old. Particularly if they are performed with a guttural perfection that is peppered with physical theatre […]

When the day turns dark

THE DIFFICULT AND lonely place that an illness without obvious visible signs brings remains fraught, to this day, with speculation and gossip, taboos and embarrassment. In this week’s Afrikaans-language radio drama on Radio Sonder Grense, Man op die Maan (man on the moon), written by Helena Mellet, which […]

Do you believe in magic?

FEELING JADED BY all the sham, fake news and broken dreams that this world is dishing out to all of us right now? Well, there may be an antidote. Scholars and sociologists of the ilk of Rudolf Steiner, Joseph Campbell and others drew their threads of belief out […]

Two men in the kitchen

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 […]

Two men in a sauna

PROFOUND GRIEF IS a curious cipher of very real emotions which reach much deeper than maybe you’d like. It’s a tongue loosener, a memory jolter, a redefiner. In Easter Island, a beautifully crafted English-language radio play by Anton Krueger, you get to meet a father and a son […]

To be a man

IT IS RARE for the ingredients of a play, the technique and the outcome to resonate with such a sense of shattering potency that it touches you at the core, from beginning to end and doesn’t let go. Karel se Oupa is a new play by the creative […]

Man to man over a brandy

It’s a great rarity when you are privileged enough to see a play so ununtterably perfect that you feel were you to never see a play again, it would suffice. Fairly low-key, Dop is unequivocally a play of this standard. Premised on the clichéd honest friendship between a […]