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Tag: RSG

Riding dragons

RADIO DRAMA REVIEW: KOUE KAIINGS. ONE THING THAT the mandatory conscription of young men in South Africa during apartheid did was break people literally, and blow them to bits. Another was to break them from the inside out, in a way that the crude eye of rudimentary medical […]

Death and the dithering husband

RADIO THEATRE REVIEW: DIE HUISBESOEK. WHEN YOU LISTEN to this week’s radio drama on Radio Sonder Grense, you will feel many prickles of lockdown incredulity as a bizarre tale of marital closeness, distance and schizophrenia fills your head. But those prickles have as much to do with a […]

Rich clouds of immortality, trailed

REVIEW: AFRIKAANS RADIO PLAY, MY MENSE. A TALE OF life and death, disappointment and purple pencil crayons, Dot Serfontein’s yarn My Mense (My People) is not about great manoeuvres in socio-political injustice. It is not a big story of major seismic shifts. Rather, something like 19th century French […]

When the cat’s away …

REVIEW: RADIO DRAMA: WOLF-WOLF HOE LAAT IS DIT? IT TAKES A particular kind of empathy to reflect on the messy values of human deterioration or imperfection without slipping into the cripplingly clichéd or maudlin. It takes an even more incisive understanding of what makes us human beings tick, […]

Songs of angry men and their moms

AFRIKAANS RADIO DRAMA REVIEW: VERGIFNIS. SOMETIMES RELATIONSHIPS ARE forged between people that have absolutely nothing to do with the ties of social ordinariness or the expectations of convention. Sliding carefully into archetype, these are the maverick connections necessary to bring dynamite to important ambitions. A tale of dreams, […]

Love and the edge of doom

REVIEW: AFRIKAANS RADIO DRAMA: GENADE. WHAT DOES IT mean to tell someone you love them? Is it a silly, easy cliché; does it mean you promise to love them, come what may, and do whatever you can to preserve that love, that life? Or does it mean you […]

The cardinal who couldn’t.

REVIEW: AFRIKAANS RADIO DRAMA: DIE HEKS THE 15TH CENTURY and its misogyny in Europe is legend. Iconic Afrikaans writer C Louis Leipoldt takes on the mantle worn by Umberto Eco, John Whiting and Arthur Miller in their contemplation of the phenomenon of witch burning, in a magnificent piece […]

Little girl with the face of an adult

REVIEW: AFRIKAANS RADIO DRAMA: DIE SWERFJARE VAN POPPIE NONGENA. THE POTENT TREASURE of the complicated situation of standing still in a place where history is in the making, turning and swirling on itself and all that it may mean to future generations feels particularly prescient in this age […]

A waitress’s lament

AFRIKAANS RADIO THEATRE REVIEW: SJARRAP EN EET JOU KOS! IF YOU DIDN’T hear Radio Sonder Grense’s delightful Afrikaans-radio drama offering a contemplation on the vagaries of being a waiter, a couple of years ago, or even if you did, there’s a treat awaiting you this Thursday evening. The […]