<i>Barney’s Women</i> includes four actresses and a director who evoke the memory of Barney Simon in a series of reminiscences and extracts from his workshopped plays. Pat Schwartz reviews.
<i>Batho pele</i> (putting people first); <i>motho kemotho kabatho</i> (a human being is a human being because of others); ubuntu … admirable words, fine concepts, but meaningless in a society apparently devoid of capacity, compassion or concern. How many people have the energy or the means, asks Pat Schwartz, to fight a callous and careless bureaucracy?
Beneath lowering skies on Human Rights Day, Sunday March 21, and before a coterie of international and local legal luminaries, President Thabo Mbeki declared the new Constitutional Court building at No 1, Constitution Hill, open. Its trappings might be impressive, but the Constitutional Court is only as valuable as the decisions made by its judges.
The remarkable love story of Bennie Hermer and Olda Mehr begins ordinarily enough — a young medical student meets a beautiful music student at a New Year’s Eve party — they are attracted, they date… But it is 1938 and across the seas, where Mehr is headed to take up a scholarship at London’s Royal Academy of Music, the guns of war are being primed. This will be no conventional affair, reviews Pat Schwartz.
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/ 6 February 2004
In the face of considerable revisionism in the way the Jewish community’s response to apartheid is being portrayed in a number of forums, among them Cape Town’s Jewish Museum, Gideon Shimoni’s dense and considered work serves as an antidote to overdoses of self-congratulation, writes Pat Schwartz.
Amid the acres of newsprint and video footage devoted to the horrific happenings in the Middle East, what is missing is any recognition that there are rights and wrongs on both sides…