Theatre: Shaun de Waal Insofar as Beautiful Thing, at Cape Town’s Baxter Studio, resolves itself without undue trauma to the audience, it is a ”feel-good” production. We come to care about these working-class East-Enders. (Their accents, though, make one wonder whether this shouldn’t have been called Beautiful Fing.) Jonathan Harvey’s play tells the story of […]

RUGBY: Jon Swift SUDDENLY, at a stroke if you like, the rugby season has taken a different slant, a different emphasis. Transvaal, the power province that the steely will and vast resources of Louis Luyt assembled and the deep insightful thinking of Kitch Christie honed to perfection in the 1993 season, have relinquished their hold […]

THEATRE: David Le Page The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me represents a medium familiar to South Africans, and one that is oft- reviled: it is protest theatre. The issue is not race, it is gay rights, but the anger and rhetoric are familiar. Frequently the stage becomes a podium, and Robert Finlayson, the sole performer, […]

IT seems that on the question of transparency some MPs want to have their cake and eat it. They claim to be transparent, but want to dictate the terms. The National Party and IFP are opposing a full financial disclosure code for parliamentarians. The ANC and other parties have given notice they intend fighting the […]

Neil Bierbaum THE recent release of the All Media and Product Survey (Amps) shows that, with a few exceptions, magazines suffered a significant loss of black readership, according to Tony Banahan of Lindsay-Smithers FCB. Interpreting the Amps figures, Banahan says particularly hard hit were women’s magazines. Cosmopolitan (-4,9 percent), Femina (-13,6 ),Living & Loving (-19,3), […]

A striking aspect of debate on matters of public interest in South Africa nowadays is the racial sub- text. Developers produce a scheme for the transformation of Johannesburg’s Zoo Lake. The issues are environmental. The sub-text is black business empowerment. Eugene Nyati is accused of creaming off public funds. The issue is financial accountability. Nyati […]

Home of the avant-garde or just a place to work? IAN TROMP looks at the first four years of the Speedy Bag ‘BAG Factory = Petting Zoo.” Thus reads a handwritten addition to an article in printer Mark Attwood’s file of clippings about artists based at the Fordsburg Artists’ Studios; the article, titled “State of […]

CINEMA: Jonathan Romney SINCE his creation in 1977, the monolithic future lawman Judge Dredd has been the mainstay of the weekly British comic 2000 AD — and if ever a title was approaching its sell-by date, it’s that one. 2000 AD already sounds as quaint and olde-worlde a title as George Orwell’s 1984 did by […]

Rehana Rossouw Pope John Paul II’s historic service at Gosforth Park last Sunday is in danger of going down in the history books as a reverse of the miracle of the loaves and Jubilant officials in the Catholic Church claimed the event was one of the biggest public gatherings ever in South Africa, estimating that […]

Ann Eveleth Kipha Nyawosa doesn’t believe in revenge, a remarkable principle for someone as accustomed to burying family members as he has become in the past year. Between October 1994 and June 1995, Nyawosa has buried 14 family members following a spate of brutal attacks endemic to the townships and rural areas around Port “If […]