Kung-Fu Shakespeare

This year's Shakespeare at the open air theatre at Maynardville is A Comedy of Errors. Always clever and creative, these productions are great fun. The stage is surrounded by trees, all lit up and mysterious, and the atmosphere is magical. This year the set looked like it was built out of giant children's blocks, and the whole play was done with a Kung-Fu theme. With bubbles.

Mapping humans

Waiting for the doors to open for the Vice-Chancellor's Open Lecture yesterday afternoon at the Baxter Theatre. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, Dr Max Price, invited staff, students and members of the public to attend an Open Lecture by Dr Francis S Collins, MD, PhD on ‘Genomics and global health in 2011’ and Sir Mark Walport on ‘From Genes to Health’. Fascinating stuff. These heavy-weights are here for an international H3Africa conference on human heredity and health. The highlight for me was an introduction to the site Worldmapper.org.

Take your seats

Every summer, Maynardville Open Air Theatre in Wynberg puts on a Shakespeare play, and this is without doubt the highlight of my theatre year. We have been going as a family for many, many years now, and each performance has been wonderfully fresh and creative. Just as Shakespeare's plays were intended to be performed! It is such a treat to see what interpretation has been put on the chosen play.
This year was The Taming of the Shrew, complete with Italian Cirque-du-Soleil-like performers and life size animal puppets and two comic performances from Darren Aurajo as Tranio and Juliet Jenkin as Grumio that were outstanding! Interestingly, it was The Taming of the Shrew that was the first play to be performed here in 1956.