‘The Tramp’ is punted as a pocket musical; it contains an immense ambit which peers into the complex life of a man who skirted controversy wherever he went. It holds you with beautiful performances and a set that strips the Chaplin name of cliche and gives analogue the upper hand.
‘Master Harold’ is about the love and the shame and the hate that gets rolled into one messy stream of anger in the face of caring for a broken parent. And it is about the way in which a primal gesture can so sully a conversation that it annuls it.
‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ has a strong moral back bone without being clean of fart and snot jokes that are endemic to being a tween, and performed, by a cast which is itself, adolescent, is nothing short of a magical success on the part of its director, Vicky Friedman.
This tale is about the women who have awaited their absent men for hundreds of years. It is also about men who go into the world to create lives for themselves, knowing – or maybe forgetting – about the domesticity born of innocent love, that waits for them in a rural place.
In the hands of one of South African theatre’s dream teams, this is a gem of a work. Job Kubatsi and Lebohang Motaung, in minor roles, give life to the bitter jokes that lubricated black society during the darkest days of apartheid, reminiscent of the bleak humour in Dostoevsky’s novels.
VERY OCCASIONALLY, YOU feel that sense of privilege in the presence of an artwork that brings tears and goosebumps. From the very first roll of the snare drum with the thunder of a jembe and a dun-dun behind it, Sibikwa’s 1789 will have you transfixed. It’s immersion theatre […]
TAKE AN HISTORICAL site of worship that shrieks 1980s community in South Africa. Rattle its proverbial bones with the shadows and demons of what was profoundly taboo to that sense of community, then. Toss in some harsh lights, a dash of stage smoke and doef-doef music to make […]
DANCE REVIEW: PEST CONTROL. YOU DO NOT need to know the dirty politics of the arts in contemporary South Africa in order to access the angry new dance missile which Mamela Nyamza launches at this year’s National Arts Festival. You do not need to know the specifics of […]
BOOM! ONTO THE rudimentary set dominated with brown paper explodes a young man in a war helmet (Mathews Rantsoma), manning a paper aeroplane. He’s making sums that no doubt involve geography, mathematics, aviation and pilotry. Matters of consequence, you understand. The theatrical opening of the version of The […]
THE YEAR, SO far, has been fraught with broken dreams and unfair realities. We’ve lost people we’ve loved. And jobs we’ve relied on. And when you look at people going about their daily lives, they seem to be going through the motions, rather than injecting possibility into whatever […]
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