Holding power to account
Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s third novel, Multitudes, is essentially a prequel to his first, The Broken River Tent.
Ntabeni said so in one of the panel discussions he was part of at the recent Open Book festival. But what he also said, is that it is “a prequel that is also a sequel” because the protagonist, Phila, is older in Multitudes while the historical narrative within it predates the one in his debut.… Read more
You can’t escape the bastards. They’ve inserted their insidious fingers into so many aspects of life that it is almost impossible to earn a living without being smeared by their grimy greed.
You can run an open-source Linux operating system on your computer, have no social media accounts, and use one of the many alternative browsers to Google, but you’re making a billionaire richer the moment you buy something online.… Read more
There’s got to be a word for that specific kind of grief, sings Lizzie Gaisford on the fourth track of her debut solo album Love the Land, which is a poem, almost a requiem, for nature, for ecosystems, and for things lost and things broken.… Read more
There were sergeants in the apartheid army who could bark out 30 or more words in an unbroken stream to create an extended insult involving bodily functions, body parts, bodily fluids, animals, familial relationships, and sex.… Read more
Hot from its run at the National Arts Festival (NAF) in Makhanda, Durban-based performer and comedian Ben Voss will keep asking his audiences if at 50, would anyone still want to watch him? … 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
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
There were probably few, if any, people who, when they stood up to give The Ugly Noo Noo a standing ovation in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, thought it could be even more relevant in distant 2024.
After all, when Andrew Buckland wrote and performed it in 1988 it was, disguised beneath the surreal humour and superb physical comedy, an essentially political play.… Read more
By Ashraf Hendricks/GroundUp
The Khayelitsha Music Academy started in 2006 in a shack near the beach, with just one student receiving guitar lessons. Today the school has 19 students and teaches several instruments and music theory.… Read more
Othello is in essence a soap opera. It lacks the regicide, fratricide, witchery, and mysticism of many of his other works. What we do have, though, is uxoricide, horrifyingly common in South Africa. The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice,is also arguably racist in its stereotype of the black man easily manipulated by the Machivellian European, Iago, although there are counter-arguments.… Read more