GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
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Neighbourhood black watch
SIMON PARSONS applauds an insightful state-of-the-nation play that explores the growing class divide in South Africa
IT'S BEHIND YOU: The cast of A Good House, Amy Jeptha's South African satire of class relations
[Camilla Greenwell]
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an accessible - and optimistic - take on our relationship to new technology
JOHN GREEN suggests that a new, biased, and highly readable re-hash of the story of the Cambridge Five be taken with a large pinch of salt
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a timely reminder of the long history of protests and the outdoor spaces in which they takes place
A Good House
Bristol Old Vic
AMY JEPTHA’s sharply observed satire on a gated community delves below the aspirational families’ concerns that hunker down there to explore the scars of racism and the state of post-apartheid South Africa.
In the ghost-like community of Stillwater it takes a mysterious shack appearing on a patch of wasteland to galvanise more than cursory interaction between the residents. Despite never seeing the inhabitants, its presence threatens their security from the physical to the financial, exposing the fears running beneath the surface of the growing class of the newly affluent.
The innate racism born of history is evident when the only black couple, Sihle and Bonolo, are chosen by the community’s newly created neighbourhood watch to be the sole signatories on an eviction notice for the shack dwellers. The unspoken fear that the invisible inhabitants are black cracks open hidden tensions.
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