This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

22nd September 2007

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The inaugural South African Comedy Awards ceremony was held at the Artscape Theatre in Cape Town on Monday night. That such an event exists at all is evidence of the high profile attained by comic performers in the national public view – in fact, as veteran comedians such as Joe Mafela have argued, the establishment of the awards is long overdue.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

22nd September 2007

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From the first notes of the overture, William Kentridge’s production of The Magic Flute demonstrates those features that distinguish it from other renditions of Mozart’s opera and that, for South African audiences, make it one of the brightest lights in the constellation of local performing arts.  

This article first appeared in The Mail & Guardian

24th August 2007

Enforced segregation in South Africa’s cities may have fallen away, but lifestyle habits die hard. Cultural activity in our urban areas remains geographically divided, and the theatre-going public in particular exercises a curious form of brand loyalty. In Cape Town, where inertia to change is always substantial, different theatres cater for different audiences; still, things aren’t as bad as they used to be, especially when one considers the old opposition between the Baxter Theatre and Artscape (erstwhile the Nico Malan).

This article first appeared in THE CAPE TIMES

3rd August 2007

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THE WORLD THAT MADE MANDELA by Luli Callinicos (STE Publishers)

In his foreword to The World that made Mandela (which first appeared in 2000 and was re-launched recently after the original print run sold out), the late Walter Sisulu declares boldly: “Every South African should read this book.” Many people, in response to such an injunction, might claim that they know all about the world that made Mandela – some of them, because they lived in it and through it; others, because they have read Long Walk to Freedom and similar accounts of the liberation struggle. Nevertheless, even the most well-versed citizen may gain new insight and knowledge from Luli Callinicos’ book.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

21st July 2007

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Lara Foot Newton has a bone to pick with J.M. Coetzee. Although she acknowledges that “Coetzee influences all of us and is remarkable”, her experience of reading his 2005 novel Slow Man was “awful”: “It goes beyond Disgrace in the sense that it’s so outwardly dark. Disgrace has a theatricality to it, a drive in the story-telling, whereas Slow Man has perhaps less pain but is really frustrating to read.” Foot Newton’s latest play, Reach – which premiered at the TheaterFormen Festival in Hanover, opened in South Africa at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, and is currently running at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town before moving to the Market in Johannesburg – is in part a rejoinder to the “absolutely desperate state that Coetzee writes about.”

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

14th July 2007

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For many ‘festinos’, no National Arts Festival is complete without a performance by Andrew Buckland. He has, after all, been at the annual event since the early 1980s, and it has been the launch pad for some of his most memorable plays. This year, he starred in two new shows (Voetsak! and Crapshoot) and was writer-director of a third (Love Amongst the Bones). 

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

14th July 2007

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Bending (the masculine) gender

What does it mean to be a man in twenty-first century South Africa? – a question posed and, to some degree, answered by a number of artists at this year’s National Arts Festival. 

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

14th July 2007

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Falling in love with the foreign 

Mike van Graan’s latest satire, Mirror Mirror (brought to the National Arts Festival by Geoffrey Hyland and the students of UCT’s Drama School), hints rather sardonically that there is far too much in post-apartheid South Africa that simply ‘mirrors’ the conditions of apartheid. As the title suggests, the play also emphasises the role of the artist in ‘holding the mirror up to’ contemporary society, reflecting critically on what he or she sees. Yet Van Graan has chosen to place his mock-epic in a “Wizard of Id-type land” with royals, nobles and peasants – a decidedly European setting for an obviously African play. 

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

7th July 2007

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Kissed by Brel: Not just a tribute show

Each year at the National Arts Festival, a host of singers and bands descend on venues such as the Centrestage (otherwise known as the Grahamstown Bowling Club and Scout Hall) to perform tributes to musical greats from the Bee Gees to Bob Marley, and contemporary favourites from Jack Johnson to Josh Groban. These are always popular routines, with audience numbers swelled by nostalgia and, later in the evenings, alcohol.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

7th July 2007

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More from the Marico

Patrick Mynhardt was one of the first actors to demonstrate that Herman Charles Bosman is very well suited to the stage. In fact, he became for many years the very embodiment of Oom Schalk Laurens, inimitable narrator of many of Bosman’s stories. But it seems that the possibilities for performing Bosman are far from exhausted, and in this year’s National Arts Festival programme there are no fewer than three shows based on his life and work, or inspired by the Groot Marico district that he made famous.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

7th July 2007 

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Shakespeare gets a going-over

What is today the National Arts Festival began, in 1974, with a Shakespeare Festival organised by Professor Guy Butler and colleagues to inaugurate the Monument complex on Signal Hill overlooking Grahamstown.

Though no longer the main offering, Shakespeare is still on the festival menu; there are no fewer than five ‘Shakespearean’ shows in 2007, and the bard’s work has been Joburged, hip-hopped, quarto’d, Zimbabwe’d and, would you believe it, even played ‘straight’.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

7th July 2007

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Ancient Greece comes to Africa (again): Orfeus and Medea

“Carried by the human imagination for over 3000 years,” writes Brett Bailey in his author-director notes for Third World Bunfight’s production of Orfeus at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, the myth of Orpheus has become “as smooth as a river pebble.” What he presumably means is that – while beautiful, even perfect, in its simplicity – it is compact of meaning, a complex story ground down to an archetypal essence.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

30th June 2007

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The challenges facing multilingual South Africa are not unique, but the ways in which our various languages are associated with race, ethnicity and class have moved some observers to bemoan ‘the curse of Babel’ manifested in this country. Other commentators are more sanguine, noting that linguistic variety is part of the cultural diversity so often touted as a national asset. Small wonder that it was a hot topic of conversation at this year’s Cape Town Book Fair.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

16th June 2007

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Alan Committie and Rob van Vuuren are two very busy men. Van Vuuren is appearing nightly at Cape Town’s Kalk Bay Theatre in Brother Number, a new two-hander written and performed with James Cairns, while on weekend mornings he teams up with The Most Amazing Show partner Louw Venter for “Corne and Twakkie’s Breakfast Bonanza”; as performers, directors or co-producers, he and Venter are involved in no fewer than six shows at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in July. Committie manages to visit his Cape Town home once in a while, but these days he is mostly in Johannesburg, where his take on Rob Becker’s Defending the Caveman and his own one-man show Stressed to Kill have been sell-out successes; in between all this he is bringing out a DVD of the antics of Johan van der Walt, the bumbling security officer who most people would recognise from his cameos on TV show Laugh Out Loud.

This article first appeared in The CAPE TIMES

15th June 2007

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Having read Denis Hirson’s White Scars: On Reading and Rites of Passage, I almost feel that I don’t need to interview him. After all, the book (which has been nominated for the Alan Paton Non-Fiction Award) is heavily autobiographical, and in it the author constantly reflects on his own writing process. Nevertheless, when I phone him at his Paris home a few days before he flies out to South Africa – he will be in Cape Town for the awards ceremony at the Book Fair this weekend, but returns on Sunday – I discover a different voice to those I have encountered in White Scars.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

9th June 2007

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Moods of Future Joys - Round the World Part One: Riding into Africa

Alastair Humphreys

The chief problem with this book is hinted at in the figures provided on the back cover - its author completed a round-the-world journey of 46,000 miles over four years, cycling across five continents. Quite simply, it seems that no feat of literature could ever do justice to the magnitude of his achievement in almost circumnavigating the globe by bicycle.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

5th May 2007

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Doubt is important, even necessary, to all artists. The creative process is stimulated by the challenge of holding multiple – possibly contradictory – ways of seeing the world in balance. This anticipates the various ways in which a work of art is ultimately viewed: ambiguity is, after all, prerequisite to interpretation. Writers hold doubt especially dear: Robert Graves’ poem “In Broken Images” celebrates the achievement of “a new understanding of my confusion” rather than the false (and dangerous) assurance of unshakeable opinions. Samuel Beckett avowed neither religious belief nor agnostic disbelief, thinking instead that “it is better to live, and to admit to living, in uncertainty: better because more honest”. South Africa’s Lionel Abrahams, after the 9/11 terrorist strikes, bemoaned the “divergent certainties” that led to and were aggravated by those attacks, noting that those who cling to “passionate convictions” cannot abide “the insult of questioning, the chill treachery of doubt”.