These days, the Market Theatre management claims, people book tickets because they want to and not out of some obligation to the place that, once upon a time, changed South African culture. If you pop into the theatre now you’ll find a video monitor fixed to one of those pillars laden with brass plaques. The […]
David Beresford: A SECOND LOOK In the week of the launch of a new television channel, which no doubt heralds another garbage-load of American schlock being dumped on the local market, a debate on SAfm brought it home that the true “voice of the nation” is radio. The programme was Talk at Will, the subject […]
Alex Sudheim `Comedy is the new rock ‘n roll” goes the catchphrase of the moment. Young standups across the country are provoking audiences with a scabrous brand of humour that gleefully pokes and digs at society’s guilty secrets. As with the early days of rock ‘n roll, there is a spirit of anarchic, anti-establishment zeal; […]
Angella Johnson VIEW FROM A BROAD It is exceedingly rare that the president of Johannesburg’s Central Divorce Court refuses to dissolve a marriage. Yet that was exactly what Helen Lotriet did after questioning a young husband who claimed his wife regularly cheated on him. “Are you still living as husband and wife?” inquired Lotriet. It […]
Food: Alex Dodd Having grown up in Durban, I’ve often found Indian restaurants in other places a sorry attempt at living up to the cumulative memory I have of superbly subtle curries served by mustachioed waiters in cummerbunds. I remember the extra-hot prawn curry we’d eat on Saturday afternoons in the slightly shabby dining room […]
A loud-sounding nothing. That’s what the annual International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank meetings threatened to become as the chiefs of the global economy wound up their deliberations in Washington this week. Many developing countries and emerging economies are reeling from a world economic system gone wrong: unemployment, daily company closures and crashing currencies. […]
Andy Capostagno Rugby The only certainties in life are death and taxes. So wrote Woody Allen, a man who would have difficulty just pronouncing Loftus Versfeld, let alone finding Pretoria on a map. But he would have sympathised with a few disgruntled punters who last weekend had their dreams shattered by a scoreline of Blue […]
Andy Capostagno Cricket A collective sigh of relief echoed through the corridors of power in the smaller unions this week when the United Cricket Board (UCB) decided not to impose a two-tier system on the Supersport Series. It was, by all accounts, the most conciliatory UCB meeting for years. The outcome was that, while note […]
CD of the week Michael Odell Sweeting Of course we knew there were two Ringos in the group. The Fugees, the biggest-selling rap group in the world, comprises two blokes employed to shout “One time!” and Lauryn Hill – who combines the singer/songwriter talents of Lennon and Macca. The Fugees was never the arena to […]
Waters Nick Paul Grey’s the next black and has been for some time now. The Seventies are still the Seventies, only more so. And the Blue Waters still belongs in that decade, the muted pastels of its Eighties revamp (albeit executed in the Nineties) notwithstanding. And it’s still the same place it was when Claire, […]