OPERA: Coenraad Visser DONIZETTI’s comic masterpiece Don Pasquale fares very well in Pact Opera’s restaging of its 1990 production. Against the backdrop of Anthony Farmer’s beautiful sets and with the characters splendidly and sometimes zanily dressed by Lindy Grindlay, Neels Hansen’s production sparkles with many deft comic touches deriving from the music. Hanli Stapela is […]

Critical Consumer Pat Sidley NEXT week’s Budget will please citizens who have become secondhand tobacco consumers without their consent: the anti-smoking lobby is expecting a tobacco tax increase. This may be between 25c and 40c per pack of 20s. It may not be nearly enough, but at least it’s something. And if the past is […]

Environmentalists have threatened to interdict the police minister unless he puts a stop to a Natal dagga-spraying operation, reports Eddie Koch A COALITION of civic organisations yesterday threatened to interdict Police Minister Sydney Mufamadi unless his commissioner stops the narcotics bureau from spraying large areas of KwaZulu Natal with a dangerous herbicide designed to stamp […]

Native tongue Bafana Khumalo ‘It’s the potency of black pussy.” She curled her lips around the words as if they were a choice titbit of a particularly delicious morsel. “It’s diminishing.” These words she spat out like a snake spitting poison designed to kill. I am a fly on the wall and I am viewing […]

Eddie Koch WATER Affairs Minister Kader Asmal this week instructed his officials to investigate pollution charges against the controversial Thor Chemicals factory in the kwaZulu/Natal Midlands. The minister’s move follows a personal inspection of the factory where at least two workers have died of mercury poisoning and scores of others have been exposed to dangerous […]

A new Bill before parliament, if passed, will bring South Africa in line with world standards of censorship. Gaye Davis reports CLAUSES barring hate speech or acts likely to incite racial hatred have been erased from a new censorship Bill which sweeps away the draconian rules of the past, allowing adults to think for themselves. […]

THE deputy minister of arts, culture, science and technology should have been the government member with the longest title and the shortest job-lifespan. Instead, her political survival is being assisted by incompetence and prevarication. The South African Police Services may have changed its title, but it still lacks the savvy to know that when you […]

Reg Rumney Chemicals giant AECI’s 40 percent increase in earnings per share to 186 cents for the year ended December is no mean achievement. As managing director Mike Smith points out, with the first half of 1994 disrupted by public holidays, and the second half made problematic by a long automotive strike, a 40 percent […]

Ann Eveleth analyses the outcome of the special IFP meeting in Ulundi last weekend All eyes focused on Ulundi last weekend, when the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) met to decide its fate in the government of national unity (GNU). The parliamentary walk-out nearly two weeks earlier appeared to signal the death-knell of the reconcilation politics […]

THEATRE: Guy Willoughby JUST what are Barney Simon and his cast doing in this bad production of a good but dated play about hopelessness in London’s East End? Sad to tell, but Simon — one of South Africa’s most celebrated directors — seems to have lost his way; at the very least, this version of […]