Holding power to account
Steve Kretzmann 
It might be assumed, particularly given his generation, that the brawling, bullfighting, big-game-fishing, larger-than-life soldier and Nobel Prize-winning writer Ernest Hemingway smoked.
But in the biography Papa Hemingway, which focusses on the last decades of his life, A.E.… Read more
Liwa Ekimakingaï sits atop his grave, having been hurled there by a cyclone that sucked him out of the earth. At only 24-years-old, and wearing an orange crepe jacket, fluorescent-green shirt and purple flared trousers, Liwa realises he has died, and has been dreaming of his death.… Read more
A play with sexual encounters as its premise is likely to read very differently today, then it did when first written in 1897.
Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde (originally Reigen in German) is made up of ten scenes, each one being a sexual encounter, but involving a character from the previous scene.… Read more
An attempt to evict dozens of people living in and around Hope Street Park in lower Gardens is before the High Court, with the park occupiers arguing the City’s Safe Spaces are not suitable as alternative accommodation.… Read more
Rejecting her husband’s disparagement, Nora Helmer walks out the door, leaving him and two small children behind.
That was the final scene of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, first performed in Copenhagen in 1879. In A Doll’s House, Part 2, written in 2017 by American playwright Lucas Hnath, Nora returns 15 years later with a knock on the same door.… Read more
Bass virtuoso Herbie Tsoaeli, who has been at the centre of both establishing our rich jazz tradition, and keeping it alive, is playing with his quintet at Art in Jazz on 1 May. At Room 91 (just above Chef’s Warehouse) on 91 Bree Street, there’ll also be work by numerous artists exhibited, including by Blessing Ngobeni.… Read more
Residents of Blaauwberg on Cape Town’s west coast are locked in a battle over a proposed development on ecologically sensitive land in Big Bay.
About 30 families are currently living on the land in shacks.… Read more
The absolutely superb actor Tony Miyambo brings Red Peter back to the stage in Kafka’s Ape, an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s A Report For An Academy, in which the Ape presents himself as a civilised being after being captured and trained.… Read more
Rarely does a novel teach you to listen. There is a scene in Richard Powers’s Orfeo in which the protagonist, avante-garde composer Peter Els, presents his final undergraduate composition at a famed music school in rural Indiana to his tutor, Karol Kopacz.… Read more
