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 […]
CINEMA: William Pretorius IF, as Situationist Guy Debord announced would happen in the 1960s, the rise of the mass media has turned society into spectacle, then serial killers are the prime exhibits. They are no longer regarded as murderers, but as gruesome celebrities. That’s why Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers got it right: the movie […]
WRESTLING: Mapula Sibanda THE evening started with screams of disgust at local boy “Hammer”, swaggering round the ring in neon-flowered lycra tights, throwing his spit in the air and swallowing it back again. But it was all part of the entertainment at the international wrestlemania-type tournament at Turffontein’s Wembley Indoor Arena last Friday. The five-bout […]
Bruce Cohen Winnie Mandela may have angered Nelson and upstaged Thabo, but she’s been thrilling the northern suburbs of Johnnesburg with an urban legend of epicurian The rumour started last November and goes something like this: Winnie and party of 10 or so arrived at the famed Ile de France restaurant in Bryanston, owned by […]
Fidel Castro and Nelson Mandela will speak on the same platform in Copenhagen this weekend, but South Africa still seems to have mixed feelings about Cuba, writes Peter Vale TEN months after the election, South Africa still seems unable to articulate a coherent and cohesive policy towards Cuba. Certainly foreign minister Alfred Nzo’s performance on […]
ANTON Harber has been named sole editor of the Weekly Mail & Guardian. Harber has been co-editor since the paper’s launch a decade ago. The other co-editor, Irwin Manoim, has been appointed to head the planning for a new publishing venture that is part of the WM&G group’s development “Changes in South African politics and […]
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 […]
In search of an outside perspective on Johannesburg’s much- mooted Biennale, Ivor Powell spoke to influential visiting ArtForum critic Thomas McEvilley As interviewees go, Thomas McEvilley is more than a little like a chess player: the strategy unfolds according to interior logics that are more telling in their totality than as individual responses to individual […]
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 […]