This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

14th June 2008

View online here

About a year ago, in one of the cavernous Grahamstown school halls used as theatre venues at the National Arts Festival, I discovered Jacques Brel. Of course, I’d heard of Brel before, and knew some of the popular versions of his songs: “If We Only Have Love”, “Jackie”, or the more saccharine renditions of “Seasons in the Sun”. But it was only when I attended a performance of Kissed by Brel, watching and listening in awe as Claire Watling (accompanied on the piano by Godfrey Johnson) brought Brel’s lyrics and melodies to life, that I realised quite how remarkable a poet and musician he was.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

7th June 2008

View online here

When Counting Crows first toured South Africa in August 1999, they played to a packed house at the Sun City Superbowl. The Springboks had just lost to the All Blacks and frontman Adam Duritz commiserated with the crowd, but when a few patriotic fans started waving South African flags, Adam’s response was curt: “Hey man, this is rock’n’roll, put those f***ing flags away!”

Since then, I’ve been wanting to ask the Crows about the link between music and politics – especially at a time when, from global warming to third world debt, it’s pretty sexy for rock stars to wear their political colours on their sleeves. After all, the band has demonstrated an ongoing social commitment through its Greybird Foundation, which raises money for needy causes, and they are actively encouraging Americans to vote in the upcoming presidential elections. But there’s little overtly ‘political’ content in their music.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

7th June 2008

What does it mean to be ‘coloured’? The narrator of Njabulo Ndebele’s novella Fools describes “the tragic illusion of people conditioned to draw their greatest inspiration from the little white blood in them ... living in the perpetual uncertainty of not knowing whether they are loved or hated.” Guy Butler, one of many white writers who have presumed to write about coloured experience, noted that “the contemplation of this most unethnic of South Africa’s ethnic groups has, from the beginning, evoked a mixed response: mingled affection and contempt, liking and loathing” and, elsewhere, wrote sardonically about “the great disgrace” of “a touch of the tarbrush” in one’s face.

This article first appeared in THE MAIL & GUARDIAN

6th to 12th June 2008

There will be those who delight in the obvious joke about this book: that a work titled For the Sake of Silence (one in which, moreover, the narrator frequently meditates on the undesirability of words) extends to some 550 pages. Yet such a glib response to the length of what will no doubt prove to be Michael Green’s magnum opus is inappropriate on at least two counts.

The first is that Green’s subject – the life and times of Franz Pfanner, Trappist monk and unlikely but highly successful missionary – is the stuff of epic, and merits the thorough and detailed chronicle he offers. Pfanner’s star burned brightly in Catholic Europe and Southern Africa during the second half of the nineteenth century, both reinvigorating and undermining the centuries-old monastic order of which he became one of the most famous, if also one of the most controversial, members.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

24th May 2008

View online here

Jean Jansem’s Expressioniste Humaniste opened last week at Johannesburg’s Everard Read gallery amidst a flurry of air kisses and idle chit-chat. The city’s well-to-do denizens flocked to see and be seen at an exhibition by this internationally prized French artist: investors aiming to use those all-important little red dots to secure artworks selling into the millions, socialites enjoying the chance to network or gossip over a glass of red wine.

If this reviewer was more aware than usual of an atmosphere of frivolity and pretension, it is because Jansem’s work is anything but frivolous or pretentious. Indeed, most of the pieces on display in this exhibition are portraits of forlorn and morose-looking women. When their faces are visible, their eyes express regret or anxiety; when their backs are turned, their exposed skin and closed posture make them seem vulnerable.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

24th May 2008

View online here

The Johannesburg City Hall is one of those architectural gems largely unknown to most residents of the conurbation that is greater Joburg. Built in 1915, it has survived – like a handful of other fine buildings in ‘the dodgy part of town’ – our local developers’ obsession with demolishing any building over half a century old. (This is, by the way, a well-established habit; in an essay titled “Old Joburg is Vanishing” that is itself more venerable than most of the buildings in ‘new Joburg’, Herman Charles Bosman wrote: “I sorrow for the buildings and the people who have gone. People and things that have vanished like hopes. All gone into the unremembering dust ...”)

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

3rd May 2008

View online here

Lara Foot Newton is an optimist. The plays that she has written all demonstrate a belief in the possibility of redemption – or, at least, the redemptive power of theatre – in the midst of socio-political and personal milieus that constantly offer reasons to be pessimistic.

In Tshepang (2003), she re-imagined the desperate, poverty-stricken lives of those involved in one of South Africa’s perverse infant rape cases, but was able to make a minimal gesture of comfort to the mother of the child. In Hear and Now (2005), she portrayed the fraught relationship between a longsuffering woman and a physically and emotionally crippled man, but nevertheless affirmed the value of that relationship. In Reach (2007), she depicted a transformation from racial mistrust, loneliness, bitterness and even suicidal despair into companionship and encouragement through the growing friendship between a young black man and an ageing white woman.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

3rd May 2008

View online here

We might joke about “the uncultured yanks”, but South Africans (like most people worldwide) imbibe American culture from a young age. We take this for granted when it comes to TV shows, movies and mainstream music, but it’s also true of the theatre – particularly musical theatre. Just ask those who have produced or performed in local stagings of popular musicals like Chicago, Hair or The Rocky Horror Show, which regularly play to packed houses while other productions languish in front of small audiences.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

26th April 2008

View online here

Puccini, Verdi, Mozart, Bizet and Bach are not to everyone’s taste. At the same time, opera purists don’t like to see these and other cherished operatic icons sexed up, dressed down, parodied or performed in a contemporary, globalised idiom. So in conceiving and creating OperaMania, a visual and musical extravaganza that is part rock opera and part mock opera, Andrew Botha is walking a fine line. But Botha, probably best known in South Africa for his Queen at the Opera, has found a cast and crew who are willing to walk that line boldly (even brazenly) and, for much of the time, with their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks. This attitude is infectious, and it will be hard for those who see the show – opera buffs and the anti-opera brigade alike – not to be carried along by the production’s sheer iconoclastic energy.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

26th April 2008

View online here

Okay, I’ll admit it upfront: I’m a Chicago nut. The jazz, the pizzazz, the razzmatazz; the witty lyrics, the score that leaps from booming brass to sultry strings, the lithe bodies, the sharp satire. But – here’s the embarrassing part – until recently I’d only seen the 2002 movie (and listened repeatedly to the soundtrack). I didn’t catch Chicago: The Musical when it was first performed on South African stages a couple of years ago, something I regretted all the more when I heard friends describing how it was such a polished production that “even the cigarette smoke was in synch”.

This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

20th April 2008

View online here

City living isn’t easy; and sometimes, after yet another day of battling with the perils of the urban jungle, even the most ardent aesthete-intellectual can be so tangled in a knot of tension that the last thing he or she feels like is an intense engagement with ethical or philosophical problems. As stress levels continue to rise (along with interest rates), “serious theatre” types like yours truly find it increasingly difficult to achieve transcendence, or catharsis, or jouissance, or whatever it is that we expect “serious theatre” to offer. So it’s good just to sit back and enjoy some art lite – to laugh at ourselves, at others like us and, more often than not, at those who are entirely unlike us.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

19th April 2008

View online here

The Lion And The Jewel, one of Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka’s best-known plays, was first performed in 1963. It is very much a work of its time: like compatriot Chinua Achebe’s novels of the 1960s, or poems such as Song of Lawino (by Ugandan Okot p’Bitek), which appeared in 1966, it expresses the tensions felt in many newly-independent African countries between traditional beliefs or customs and the forms of modernity typically associated with the West.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

12th April 2008

View online here

Sky’s The Limit is a new play devised by Helen Iskander and students from Wits University. Iskander is well-known for her work with husband and co-founder of the Fresco Theatre company, James Cunningham (Baobabs Don’t Grow Here, Jutro, Electric Juju), and this production bears the marks of her previous successes. But that’s not to say it is entirely successful.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

5th April 2008

View online here

They were, in many ways, two exquisitely South African scenes. In the first, Vusi Mahlasela sang songs of forgiveness and joy and mourning to a multiracial – although predominantly pale – multigenerational audience. A cloudy Table Mountain presided over the occasion. It was the opening event of the Kirstenbosch summer season of outdoor concerts, and it was good. In the second, arch rocker and alternative-Afrikaner icon Karen Zoid and her band jammed with Selaelo Selota, whose acoustic guitar and lyrics fuse jazz with the music of mineworkers on the reef and traditional Pedi songs. The landscape was the same, although the weather was better: bright sunshine and blue skies. It was near the end of the Kirstenbosch season of concerts, but it was still good.

To the careful observer, however, both occasions were also replete with (specifically South African) moments of irony.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

29th March 2008

View online here

“Powerful” is a word that is over-used in the description of dramatic works – and more’s the pity, because when a truly powerful piece of theatre like Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking comes along, it’s difficult to find the vocabulary to discuss its effect.

This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

16th March 2008

View online here

The 2008 FNB Dance Umbrella has come to an end, after a month of contrasting performances that demonstrated the rich imaginative seam running through the bedrock of South African dance.

The Gala Evening at the University of Johannesburg Arts Centre was an appropriately celebratory event, with performances of various works that have been staged at the Umbrella during its twenty-year existence.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

8th March 2008

View online here

That congenitally unhappy Irishman, Samuel Becket, is probably top of the list of famous theatrical control freaks. The Nobel prize-winning playwright was insistent that his characters interact onstage in precisely the way that he envisioned when he penned his script; he was the bane of many a director and actor, whose creative licence was undermined by Beckett’s authorial commands. When Waiting for Godot became an international sensation, however, and was performed in different languages by different companies across the globe, Beckett had to resign himself to letting others present his great play to the world.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

8th March 2008

View online here

You had to feel for Dawn Lindberg. She didn’t see it coming.

The fifth edition of the Naledi Theatre Awards (Lindberg’s “baby” – she is the Executive Director) had gone as well as could be expected. Some of the celebrities who were announcing the awards had botched their reading of the nominees; the presenters had made their fair share of shoddy jokes; a number of the recipients were not there to collect their awards; but, on the whole, a good time had been enjoyed by all.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

1st March 2008

View online here

Visitors to this page may know that I was recently given one of the English Academy of Southern Africa's Thomas Pringle awards (in the reviews category). The prize was based on a portfolio of reviews published in The Weekender in 2007. Now, I'm usually opposed to the kind of shameless self-promotion to which many websites resort, but in this case I'm making a rather egotistical exception.

My editor at The Weekender, Rehana Rossouw, generously used her column space in the most recent edition to cover the prizegiving event. This is what she had to say ... 

This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

2nd March 2008

View online here

Attending a double bill of performances by the Via Katlehong dance company at the Market Theatre – the fourth of over twenty programmes making up this year’s FNB Dance Umbrella – I found myself sitting next to a boy of about six years old. “Out of the mouths of babes ...”, they say; and I couldn’t help feeling that the young boy’s unrestrained responses to the first half of the show (“Toutes sorts des déserts”, choreographed by Christian Rizzo, who was invited to work with Via Katlehong in a South African-French collaboration) expressed my own muted thoughts.