Theatrical conceits, much like London buses, seem these days to come in threes. Or so it is suggested by the Neil Bartlett/Handspring collaboration Or You Could Kiss Me, the third Cottesloe production this year to peer into the future, albeit only as far as 2036, whereas Mike Bartlett's Earthquakes in London leapt forward to 2525. (Completing the trifecta: Tamsin Oglesby's Really Old, Like Forty Five, set a comparatively imminent 40 years ahead.) And while Oglesby's play featured a robotic nurse, this latest opening puts some very singular puppets centre-stage, alongside a vision of infirmity Read more ...

Regulars of theartsdesk will be familiar with the work of Jillian Edelstein. Her portraits of cultural figures have adorned several of our series, theartsdesk Q&A. There is now a chance to see pictures from her most celebrated collection at a new gallery and bookshop in south London. Edelstein was the photographer charged with recording in her native South Africa the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. Held all over the country across a four-year time span, the Commission afforded victims the chance to confront their perpetrators and through their confessions seek, if not Read more ...

This month's top releases are headed up by a brilliant covers album by Brazilian singer Seu Jorge, and the Manic Street Preachers and Richard Thompson on peak form. Elsewhere there is South African pianist Kyle Shepherd, Argentinian "eccentric mystic" Axel Krygier and dance music from Underworld and Superpitcher and "like a Humberside Randy Newman" Paul Heaton. Reviewers are Sue Steward, Joe Muggs, Russ Coffey, Peter Culshaw, Kieron Tyler, Marcus O'Dair, Bruce Dessau and Howard Male.CD of the MonthSeu Jorge and Almaz Seu Jorge and Almaz (Now Again Records)by Sue Steward"Errare humanum est” is Read more ...

The BBC's cultural conscience has been pricked, it would seem, by the World Cup now reaching its endgame in South Africa. Either that or departments don't talk to one another. Singing for Life, Sunday night's documentary on BBC Four about the young singers who aspire to trade the township choir for the opera stage, also focused on Fikile Mvinjelwa, a Cape Town baritone who made it to the Met. Now Newsnight is reporting on another singer who has been on a comparable journey to stardom.Pauline Malufane is the poster girl of Isango Portobello, the theatre company which won an Olivier Award for Read more ...

I once sat in a rehearsal room in a brick-box theatre on the outskirts of Cape Town. The cast was warming up for Carmen. First, the choreographer put 40 mostly black South African singers through a gruelling physical warm-up. Opera singers are rarely slender, and they were all in a muck sweat by the time the vocal coach stepped forward to lead them through a vocal warm-up. But when they opened their mouths it was as if someone has strapped you to a chair in a wind tunnel. The noise was transforming, majestic, all-powerful. So I knew roughly what sound to expect in Singing for Life, a Read more ...

"Change" has been the watchword of the past few months, the standard flown hopefully aloft by every political party. A week spent anxiously waiting for a political conclusion, worrying about its impact, and heatedly debating its validity has made for a more than usually vulnerable sense of British nationhood: an apt time indeed for the UK release of Triomf, a brutal South African parable about political prejudice, social intolerance, and above all the fear of the new.Set in the days leading up to South Africa’s first free elections of 1994, Michael Raeburn’s film yokes the story of a nation’s Read more ...

It's probably a bit early to start picking the best albums of 2010, but I would seriously consider a legal challenge if Diane Birch's Bible Belt isn't there or thereabouts when the votes are counted. Like a long-lost singer-songwriter classic, it accomplishes the trick of sounding instantly familiar, yet Birch herself doesn't sound quite like any other artist you've heard before. Her voice can be soft and supple, but it also has a raw, rasping quality that can saw through a song like "Choo Choo", with its vamping organ and garage-band guitars. By contrast, in the hymn-like "Forgiveness" she Read more ...

Lift music is given a conceptual twist by former Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed this week. As part of the Southbank’s Chorus! festival, Creed has recreated his Work No. 409 especially for the Royal Festival Hall’s glass lift: as visitors go up and down the six-level lift, their ascent and descent will be charted by the rising or falling pitch of professional choristers Voicelab.Creed’s voice installation is one of a number of free events and performances that are taking place to celebrate two years of choral activity in the RFH’s foyers. The public will be able to join choral clubs Read more ...

Like Hugh Masekela, pianist Abdullah Ibrahim first emerged as a member of The Jazz Epistles - that seminal, if short-lived, group who at the start of the 1960s were the first to offer a South African take on modern jazz. Both under the stage name Dollar Brand and, following his conversion to Islam, as Abdullah Ibrahim, it's an instinct he's been honing ever since. As early influences such as Ellington and Monk have gradually become less tangible, he has emerged as one of the most distinctive artistic voices of his generation.In his old age, however, Ibrahim seems to have re-embraced Ellington Read more ...

On a new CD compilation from Strut Records out this week, Next Stop... Soweto, we’re back in Soweto in the 1960s and 1970s and it's the dark, dark days of apartheid; an era in which it was actually against the law for a black South African to even be a musician, and live music was banned from most public places in black areas. There were also no cinemas, bars, hotels, shopping centres or electricity and death was an everyday fact of life. Yet only fifteen miles away, white Johannesburg’s skyscrapers glistened; an affront to the asbestos roofed, poverty-steeped insult to human dignity that was Read more ...

There is a problem with Nelson Mandela. He is, it is universally agreed, a remarkable man. His profound humanity is undoubted. He is on first-name terms with saintliness. When eventually he shuffles off his mortal coil, every newspaper on the planet will hold the front page. The problem comes when you stick him in a drama. Drama calls for its characters to go on a journey, to be visited by doubts, to overcome demons, to keep an audience guessing. Madiba, to use his Xhosa clan name, is all things to all men and women. Apart from scriptwriters.Not that that stops them. He has cropped up in Read more ...

Early on in Michael Samuels’ unremittingly sombre film about Winnie Mandela, the star-crossed heroine made the observation that being married to Nelson meant you were also married to “the struggle”, and would inevitably end up in Nelson’s shadow. So it proved. Even as she went to meet Nelson (David Harewood) as he was finally released after 27 years in jail, Winnie (Sophie Okonedo) was advised to learn from the example of Prince Philip and the way he walks dutifully one step behind the Queen.With her husband sweating it out either in hiding or subsequently in Robben Island prison, Winnie was Read more ...