Nick Paul, resplendent in designer khaki, gets lost in tent town and discovers the Durban July is little more than a freak show July day sits in the middle of Durban’s social calendar like a large, clever, sharp-tongued Berea matron with a fine mind and too much time on her hands. Everyone wants to be […]

Lauren Shantall If A Midsummer Night’s Dream focuses, in part, on the near-disastrous consequences of the generation gap, then director Jesse Knott’s version provides a streetwise, youth-based antidote to the problem facing today’s theatre: how to draw new audiences. She has dramatically revolutionised the original. Located in a dream world that is harrowingly familiar, the […]

The extraordinary breadth and variety of the Standard Bank National Arts Festival is both its strength and a disadvantage, writes Alex Dodd from Grahamstown Try putting the contents of the Internet onto a piece of A4 paper and you’ll get a feel for the Standard Bank National Arts Festival in Grahamstown 1998. Eclectic is a […]

Too often South Africa’s transitional government has been held up as a model for other countries undergoing profound political change. Usually wrongly. But this country does offer a good example to Nigeria as its military regime gropes its way in the wake of the deaths of former dictator Sani Abacha and the man elected president […]

Anthony Egan THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN SURFACE by Kate Turkington (Penguin) Historians, philosophers and even a few theologians have frequently declared the death of God and the end of religion. Yet today we see a religious resurgence on almost all fronts: pentecostal and fundamentalist Christianity, often militant Islam, renewed interest in the occult, New […]

Robin McKie If there is a gene for causing uproar, Craig Venter has it. More importantly, he is also the man most likely to isolate it. In the predatory world of advanced biotechnology, Venter — head of the Institute of Genomics Research in Maryland – is regarded as a deadly member of a breed of […]

Stewart Dalby Spending it The tantrums and antics of some modern chess masters are nothing new, it would seem. Histories of the game tell a story, possibly apocryphal, that the earliest recorded enthusiast in Britain was the Viking King Canute (1016 to 1035). It seems that Canute quarrelled one day when playing Earl Ulf, who […]

European ballet and African dance forms are connecting, writes Phillip Kakaza The sun was too bright for a winter afternoon – not for me, a son of Africa, but for the Birmingham Royal Ballet dancers currently on tour in South Africa. And the English dancers’ interaction with 20 young South African dancers in a match-box […]

than the mail Douglas Rushkoff Online Never, ever, respond to an e-mail advert again. You’ll be doing yourself and the rest of us trying to work or play on the Internet a big favour. I’ve made a habit, perhaps even an ethic, of shrugging off commercial advances on the Internet. Since the real estate in […]

Five lucky Friday readers can each win a set of five volumes in the recently relaunched Oxford World’s Classics series -Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, Middlemarch by George Eliot, and The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. All […]