David Fick - Page 14

WAR HORSE has finally made its way onto South African stages, currently in the second and final leg of its national tour. As many a headline has declared since the local tour was announced: Joey has come home.

As a part of its mandate to showcase new voices, Artscape is presenting, in association with the newly formed Papercut Collective, UHM, a play that takes a satirical look at the enduring legacy of colonialism in Africa.

You have to hand it to Louis Viljoen. The man is an honest-to-god real-as-they-come playwright, and he explores something new in every play he writes. His latest piece, THE PERVERT LAURA, is a taut psychological drama about a woman whose past manifests itself her present, driving her to face some dark truths and make some difficult choices.

Imagine watching Lewis Carroll's Alice chat to the Caterpillar for an hour. That's a good place to begin imagining what THE SWELL, the play collaboratively created and presented by Horses' Heads Productions and Fruitzalad Productions, is like.

Nobody does dance on local stages like the Cape Dance Company (CDC). Their 2013 season of CADENCE at the Artscape Theatre was the local dance highlight of the year and they top themselves in 2014's presentation of BLUE, a compilation of eight eclectic pieces from half a dozen choreographers.

Last Sunday, Play Club celebrated its second anniversary with a reading of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Christopher Sergel's stage adaptation of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Play Club is a monthly event in Cape Town that was initiated by Drew Rienstra with the vision of building a community among theatre lovers, including actors, theatre-makers, filmmakers, educators, critics and theatre audiences.

In SMAARTIES, performance becomes a metaphor for schizophrenia, with everything in Jannes Erasmus's script to in Quintin Wils's design and direction and Jaco Jansen van Rensburg's videography calculated to a embody a single character's psychosis.

Although the basic outline of the play remains the same, RETURN OF THE ANCESTORS has been revised in the four months that have passed since its premiere. The new script and its associated theatrical production improve on the earlier version of the play.

There is a sense of complacency that infiltrates almost every aspect of STEALING THE SHOW: BETTE MIDLER. Is there any point in paying tribute to a performer like Bette Midler and ignoring almost everything that makes her distinctive in the first place?

CURL UP AND DYE emerges as a still relevant piece of theatre some 25 years after its original premiere. Every issue that the play serves up - from racism and the systematic abuse of women to prostitution and the scourge of drugs and alcohol - still haunts this country. It may not be one of the classic greats, but it certainly is a pop culture staple of the South African theatre landscape.

THE LAST MOUSTACHE certainly has an intriguing premise and indulges in some fun meta-theatricality as Tim Plewman does his best to sell the audience on the material.

Watching a new production by the Rust Co-operative, the two-year old theatre company co-founded by Philip Rademeyer and Penny Youngleson, comes with the knowledge that the audience will be presented with a piece of theatre that, one the one hand, aims to offer a powerful emotional experience and, on the other, grapples with the socio-political milieu of contemporary life in the South African and global communities

It is rare to find a piece as beautifully shaped for a specific age group as Magnet Theatre's enchanting TREE / BOOM / UMTHI. Created for 3 - 7 year olds, it engages its audiences with stories and images plucked from the world that surrounds them.

SILENT VOICE is something else. An audacious play written and directed by Aubrey Sekhabi, it shatters conservative middle class perceptions of that which represents a compelling theatre experience and is the kind of confrontational and provocative theatre that we do not see often enough on main stem stages in this country.

The Baxter Dance Festival celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. The festival should be a cultural institution on Cape Town's annual calendar, an ideal point of convergence for links between the dance community and the community at large.

Every now and then, a piece of theatre comes along that could be described as a kind of 'gateway drug': a show that people will remember being incredibly entertaining and that might make them think that this business of going to the theatre is worth all the fuss. DIRTY WORDS is that kind of show.

The premiere of Rafiek Mammon's new play, THE GARAGE SALE is marketed as a sardonic exploration of the darker, yet funnier, side of Cape Town suburbia, an explicitly edgy play dealing with the effects of rape.

As a play text, WOUNDS TO THE FACE is perhaps not as brutal an onslaught on audience reception as some of Howard Barker's other plays, but this production by the University of Cape Town's Drama Department certainly does reveal how challenging the piece is to realise as theatre, especially for young actors who can take away a great deal from engaging with a piece like this.

Grammy award-winning violinist, producer and humanitarian Miri Ben-Ari has released a statement in response to the announcement that the 14th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in South Africa has been cancelled.

There is a great deal going on in the mind-scape that is PIET SE OPTELGOED. A piece of theatre that defies labels, it could be described as post-modern feminist visual theatre of the absurd.