OPERA: Coenraad Visser AS one has come to expect, the Italian Opera Gala presented by the Roodepoort City Opera is something of a curate’s egg. But the good parts are quite simply stunning. Excerpts from eight Italian operas are presented on an open stage, without the aid of props or costumes. But with imaginative direction […]

CINEMA: Justin Pearce IN Grief, a television production company occupies offices that used to house a brothel, and, as their producer remarks, it’s now a different kind of prostitution that goes on there. Making low-budget daytime television is prostitution in more than one sense though, as much about the displaced gratification of desire as about […]

Whether I live or die is immaterial. It is enough to know that there are people who commit time and energy to fight this one evil among so many others predominating worldwide. If they do not succeed today, they will succeed tomorrow. We must keep on striving to make the world a better place for […]

FINE ART: Hazel Friedman ASK anyone who knows anything about Trevor Makhoba’s art where his best paintings can be found, and you’ll be told to look not in the myriad institutions and public collections that house his work, but in the township of Umlazi. It was here, before this area of KwaZulu-Natal became one of […]

Fascist groups are using the information superhighway to spread the word of Aryan supremacy, reports Bruce Cohen NEO-NAZIS and racists are spinning a busy web of hate on the Internet. Previously limited to private bulletin boards, a number of these sites have emerged on the World Wide Web, offering a chilling and fascinating insight into […]

Funds destined for community cultural groups have been redirected back to the performing arts councils. HAZEL FRIEDMAN reports on the ensuing fracas CULTURAL war is being waged over cuts in provincial funding promised to community cultural structures by the Ministry of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. The battlelines have been drawn between the Gauteng-based Arts […]

CRICKET: Jon Swift For the South African players, playing against the English is a special experience, but beating them would be even better THERE is something very special about playing against England. South African opener Andrew Hudson is just one of the 11 men who face England in the current Test at Centurion Park who […]

Karen Harverson THE platinum market, although sensitive to sudden increases in supply, is unlikely to be hit too hard when the United States sells off its strategic stockpile of platinum as announced in September 1994. “The US has not yet decided how much of its 453 000oz of platinum will be sold off or when […]

A court case this week saw Winnie Mandela lose R100 000 following her failure to pay an air charter bill — and revealed some bizarre facts about her Co-ordinated Anti-Poverty Programmes, reports Justin Pearce A PRINCE telling a court of law he took his orders unquestioningly from “Mummy”. A church minister and self-appointed business consultant […]

Professor Charles van Onselen, Wits University historian, in THE MARK GEVISSER PROFILE PERHAPS the problem Charles van Onselen has, I think as we sit together on a Sunday afternoon, is that he looks — ; and sometimes sounds — like the enemy: bulging eyes beneath a balding pate, ware-ding khaki shorts, blustering physicality, bombast and […]