Thembela Madliki is the final recipient of the TAAC bursary for emerging directors and Where She Walked is the final production of this extraordinary and visionary project that has produced some of Cape Town’s premier directors. I am going to miss it so much. I saw Where She Walked at a preview performance because I couldn’t make the official opening and I loved it. I loved it unreservedly, emotionally and deeply. I loved it because it has similar preoccupations and themes with my work at the moment, and I loved it because I was surprised and satisfied with how the play was executed. Where She Walked is a three hander that deals with family, land, connection, the conflict of the modern world versus...

Megan Furniss WeekendSpecial

The former ‘homelands’ of Ciskei, Transkei, and others up north were hollowed out by the colonial and then apartheid laws that all but forced working age men to become migrant labour for the mines – with women following shortly thereafter – and the lack of rural investment and the necessity of wages has further decimated these areas during the two decades of democracy. Thousand of people leave the Eastern Cape every year too seek work or schooling in the cities and towns of the Western Cape, to succeed or suffer on the crowded margins. But the ancestors are strong. They won’t let their descendants be lost to the mirage of urban bling, pulling them back to the hearth for rituals, funerals and celebrations. Pulling back their money too, in the form of remittances to aged or sick relatives. This is the background to Thembela Madliki’s new play Where She Walked, which adds the element of rapacious...

Steve Kretzman The Critter