Originally published in Cue.
It’s only the first night of Festival and it’s already bitterly cold. “Do you mind if we do this outside? I’m dying for a cigarette,” Godfrey Johnson asks apologetically before ushering us out the side door of this bowls club turned performance venue.
“You know,” he says, lighting the cigarette, “it feels like just the other day. Isn’t that bizarre?” It’s been a year since I last interviewed him, and the energetic cabaret performer gets straight into it.
Originally published in Cue.
Every year at the Student Theatre Festival, a young drama student is pulled from the pack and awarded Most Promising Student Director. Along with R15000 towards producing an original work, the director is given a slot on the Fringe programme the next year to perform it in.
Last year’s winner, director of UCT’s Behind Every Yawn There Is A Silent Shout, Mira Sydow, has returned this year with Epoch, a visually striking play about the human psyche that just simply fails to cohere into a compelling story.
Originally published in Cue.
The Rhodes University production at the Student Theatre Festival never fails to draw a crowd. Solo,which follows a mother’s journey to retrieve her drowned daughter, opened to a sold-out house.
The directorial debut of master’s student Hannah Lax stars Fleur du Cap-winning Liezl de Kock as the mother, whose anguish at the death of her child is breathtaking.
Originally published in Cue.
The Antidote’s blurb in the official programme gives only the slightest hint of the play’s plot and themes. The strange mix of sentence fragments and wordplay reads like something a beat poet wrote while on an acid trip.
But don’t let the convoluted description dissuade you from watching this intense piece of theatre from the Durban University of Technology.
Originally published in Cue.
Opening the annual Student Theatre Festival for the second year in a row, the University of the Witwatersrand brings a political piece that played to a packed crowd at the Rehearsal Room yesterday. Dedicated to South African domestic workers, Maid in Mzansi is relevant and powerful.
The cast of seven workshopped the play with their director, Roberto Queiroz. The script is based on interviews with their own domestic workers, a personal touch that works well to prevent the piece from straying into a depiction of binary good and evil, and allows for a sensitive look at all the characters. Although some dialogue is remarkably unsubtle, the solid cast performance and mature satire carry the play.
Originally published in Cue.
Filled with the testimony of perpetrators, victims and witnesses of the xenophobic attacks that rocked the nation in May 2008, The Line has already been nominated for five Naledi Awards. Writer and director Gina Shmukler created the piece from research for her Masters in Drama at Wits University.
Originally published in Cue.
If the measure of a controversial play is how much of the audience has left by the time the curtains close, then Bitteris doing well. The play’s title references the provocative Afrikaans comic strip Bitterkomix, a certain amount of controversy is to be expected. Bitter delivers beyond the 16+ age restriction.
Stellenbosch University’s contribution to the Student Theatre Festival starts off tamely enough, masquerading as an art installation that the audience is forced to walk through to get to their seats.
Originally published in Cue.
Moor, Rhodes University’s contribution to this year’s Student Theatre Festival, is a powerful and thought-provoking adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello.
Director Jess Harrison, currently doing her Master’s degree in directing at Rhodes, successfully adapts the Bard’s racially-charged script with the ideas of Fanon, Cleaver, Malcolm X, Biko and du Bois.
While Moor is still set in Venice and Cyprus, the racial dichotomy within the piece is played out between ex-colonial whites and amaXhosa instead of Venetian elites and the “noble moor”. (more…)
Originally published in Cue.
The annual Student Theatre Festival kicked off yesterday with the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) production Fire:Burn. The programme is sponsored by the South African Post Office and forms part of the main Festival programme.
The two-man show began life as an untitled spoken word poetry performance in the Wits Orientation Week at the beginning of the year with a much larger cast. Director and co-lead Zewande Bk. Bhengu then refined the piece into the curious mixture of slam poetry, dance and traditional theatre that is Fire:Burn with the help of his co-star Lebogang Shikwambane.
Stuart Thembisile Lewis 