BOOK SA – Reviews

Uitspraak: wortel

Daar het onlangs stemme op gegaan dat die Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns se Hertzogprys vir Drama ook aan ongepubliseerde dramas toegeken moet word, want daar verskyn so min in boekvorm. Uitgewers vra tereg hoeveel mense koop en lees tog nou dramas? Dié paar wat dit ­nodig het, koop een en dupliseer verder. Dalro en LitNet pak wel tekste in “spense”.
Maar tog is daar nog altyd dramas formeel gepubliseer: wanneer opvoerings daarvan “in die nuus was”, en – veral – as die teks ontleedbaar op skool is en daarom in groot getalle voorgeskryf gaan word.

• Lees die volledige resensie in Die Burger

• Victoria tuisblad

Boekbesonderhede

• Victoria deur Athol Fugard
  EAN: 9780636096554
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Uitspraak: Stokkie

Dit is moeilik om Adriaan Meyer se Prinsloo Versus (lelik uitgegee, met te veel setfoute) te beoordeel sonder om die stuk op die verhoog te gesien het. Die impak van ’n opvoering sal onder meer bepaal word deur die mise-en-scène en die aksente van ’n regisseur.

Die opset is baie druk, met die aanwesigheid van Koos Prinsloo self in verskeie gedaantes, drie kritici, ’n aantal spelers in ’n verskeidenheid rolle en ’n dramaturg wat van tyd tot tyd ingryp of die ­protagonis konfronteer.

• Lees die volledige resensie in Die Burger

Boekbesonderhede

• Prinsloo Versus deur Adriaan Meyer
  EAN: 9781869192525
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Critic Charles Isherwood finds Have You Seen Us? to be “a distinctly minor addition to [Fugard's] renowned and influential canon” – but also finds enough merit in the play to recommend it. A woody carrot, then:

In a playwriting career spanning 50 years, Mr. Fugard has never before set a play in the United States. (He now lives in San Diego.) “Have You Seen Us?,” a world-premiere production at the Long Wharf Theater here, is a distinctly minor addition to his renowned and influential canon. Even at just over an hour, the story of Henry’s epiphany by way of a turkey-on-wheat feels padded, an anecdote worked up into a drama. But the production, ably directed by Gordon Edelstein, showcases two effective performances, from Mr. Waterston as the life-battered professor, and Liza Colón-Zayas as Adela, the young woman with whom he spars over the sandwiches before they (naturally) make peace.

The play is similar in theme and spirit (and even setting) to Tracy Letts’s “Superior Donuts.” Instead of a humble Chicago coffee shop, we are in a humble Southern California sandwich joint, the premises cheered up just a little by Christmas ornaments. As Henry explains in the lengthy monologue that opens the play, it is here that he experienced one of “those simple little accidents, those seemingly insignificant coincidences that go on to have a major effect on your life.”

• Complete article in the New York Times

Verdict: carrot

Among the events at last weekend’s The Witness Hilton Arts Festival was the launch of a new book, with strong local connections.

It is Johnny Boskak is Feeling Funny and Other Plays by Greig Coetzee, compiled and introduced by former head of the drama department on the local university campus Professor Hazel Barnes, and published by the University of KwaZulu Natal Press.

• Complete review in The Witness

Book Details

• Johnny Boskak is Feeling Funny and Other Plays by Greig Coetzee
  EAN: 9781869141806
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Verdict: carrot

Marianne Thamm reviews the stage adaptation of Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother, which will run at the Baxter Theatre from 16 September to 10 October (7.30pm nightly). See this post at artslink for more information – including cost and booking details.

Here Thamm’s review:

It is a narrative that has not yet been fully explored, at least not on stage — that of the black South African as perpetrator rather than victim of the apartheid system.

But just how culpable is a killer really when the system that surrounds him is rooted in official violence and legalised persecution?

These are just some of the philosophical issues that underpin Sindiwe Magona’s moving 1998 novel, Mother to Mother, which has been adapted for the stage.

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Verdict: stick, but only just

Why do filmmakers adapt novels to film? Simply because some novels are famous and therefore a “hot property”, meaning the film has a head start in terms of publicity and public recognition? Because there is a powerful storyline, ready-made, waiting only to be adapted to another medium? But that’s the point: it’s another medium.

Novels are made of language and movies are made of pictures. The less mental life there is in a novel, the more likely it is to adapt well. Novels can take us into a character’s mind; movies have to be content with registering what happens on an actor’s face, implying thought or feeling.

It is an old truism that few good novels adapt well to film, and JM Coetzee’s Disgrace would seem very hard to adapt. Director Steve Jacobs (not to be confused with the South African author of the same name who now, like Coetzee, lives in Australia) told me he thought the novel “cinematic”, but I know of at least one director who declined to make a film of the book because it was uncinematic.

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Alert! The Southern African Review of Books, ably run by Rob Turrell for many years, has been granted a new lease of life online, courtesy the truly fascinating web experiment that is the WayBack Machine.

A vast SARoB archive is now available – for free – at this rather ungainly URL:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.uni-ulm.de/%7Erturrell/

For readers like me, who cut their literary teeth in the 1990s, the practically endless offerings there are enough to bring a tear to the eye. Perusing the pages is like glossing the shelves of a library one hasn’t visited for years – the face lights up continually in happy recognition of the names and titles.

Here are a few samples from the archive to get you started – follow them and soon you’ll be utterly lost!

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