‘So Long, Marianne’, a tribute to Marianne Faithfull is not only about the 1960s peaceniks or the proliferation of drug-users of the 1970s, it’s a piece threaded through with Shakespeare to make you weep, taking the voice of an angel to the depths of the demonic, with cigarettes and time.
In ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, written by Oscar Wilde in 1899, it is the fresh directness of the set, and the articulate and unequivocal performances of the cast – in their bustles, snakeskin suits and all – that make it sing with a mix of cynicism, middle-finger-to-society chutzpah and sheer joy.
Life, death, betrayal and the heaviness of loss were brought onstage to Johannesburg high school students in the form of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Armed with pure use of period language, a deep understanding of purpose and meaning and a rich clarity of narrative, they were perfect.
Ziaphora Dakile, Kitty Moepang and Barileng Malebye take hold of this script which forces them into the personas of many: old and young, black and white, good and evil, with sophisticated empathy. Vying between English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa, it uses idioms that you understand from your intestines, if not grammatically.
‘Bitter Winter’ happens in a waiting room. It’s about apartheid and the shifting of the world from analogue to digital. It’s about how tightly one holds onto one’s embarrassing and life-forming secrets as it is about being in the same proverbial boat as another actor, regardless of age or experience.
Nicholas Wilcox endowed so many of his students with an unforgettable understanding of the value of play and of the complex freedom to fail. He showed youngsters how to embrace the absurd and chaotic in a world that could be cerebral and cruel as it could be beautiful and rich.
Van Graan’s wit ranges from political one-liners that make you hear the proverbial “Ba Dum Tss” at the punch line in your mind’s ear, to brilliant sketches that reverberate with smart puns and rude twists of linguistic fate, not to mention the tweaking of popular songs into oft political weapons.
IN EPISODE FIVE of Martyn Le Roux’s serialised podcast tale, Die Soutwaterheks, (The Salt Water Witch), we find a very drunk Frans Baker (Francois Coertze). After a night of scepticism and belief, with his friends, recounting his weird experiences at the mysterious hands of the sea storm and […]
IF CHRONOLOGY AND history magically got turned on its ear, who would British novelist Jane Austen be in the tweens of the 21st century? And how would she craft and position her characters? While seasoned English academic and magnificently skilled writer Helen Moffett doesn’t quite contemplate this idea […]
PLACE THEATRE DIRECTOR Yaël Farber and Shakepeare’s Macbeth on the same page and you may, in your mind’s eye and heart, picture a bloodbath of gargantuan and subtle proportions, replete with screams of agony and wails of horror. You won’t be completely wrong. Indeed, in Farber’s direction of […]
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