Prince Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna: Absolute Goodness and the Will to Self-Destruction in The Idiot
Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is not a novel about innocence misunderstood; it is a novel about goodness that arrives too early, too naked, and too unarmed for the world it enters. Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin is not a fool, nor is he a saint in the conventional sense. He is an ethical anomaly — a man whose moral transparency exposes the violent mechanics of social life. Opposite him stands Nastasya Filippovna, a woman whose intelligence, beauty, and psychological lucidity have been fused with trauma into a single, lethal self-image. Their encounter forms the novel’s tragic axis: absolute goodness meets a soul that believes it deserves destruction.
Myshkin’s tragedy is not that he is rejected; it is that he is believed, briefly, and then found unbearable. Society does not crucify him — it diagnoses him. His compassion is read as weakness, his honesty as social incompetence, his mercy as naïveté. Yet Dostoevsky is careful: Myshkin sees more clearly than anyone else in the novel. He understands human vanity, cruelty, and fear with devastating precision. What he lacks is not intelligence, but defensive illusion. He cannot lie in the way society requires one to lie in order to survive.
This becomes catastrophic when Myshkin encounters Nastasya Filippovna — a woman whose trauma has taught her that love is always a prelude to ownership, humiliation, or punishment. Nastasya is not destroyed by society’s cruelty alone; she has internalized its verdict. She believes herself irredeemable, not because she lacks moral awareness, but because she possesses too much of it. Her self-destruction is not impulsive — it is principled. She seeks to expose the hypocrisy of a world that desires her beauty while condemning her existence.
Myshkin’s love for Nastasya is radically different from the love offered by others. He does not desire her, nor does he seek to rescue her in the heroic sense. He recognizes her suffering without attempting to rewrite it. In modern terms, Myshkin offers witness rather than cure. This is precisely why his goodness becomes unbearable. Nastasya cannot accept love that does not punish her. To accept Myshkin’s mercy would require her to abandon the identity she has constructed around her suffering — and that identity is all she has left.
Here Dostoevsky articulates a terrifying psychological truth: trauma does not merely wound — it organizes the self. Nastasya’s oscillation between Myshkin and Rogozhin is not romantic indecision; it is a repetition compulsion. Myshkin represents unconditional recognition without possession. Rogozhin represents violent desire, ownership, and annihilation. Between them, Nastasya chooses not happiness, but coherence. Rogozhin confirms what she already believes about herself: that she is an object to be consumed and destroyed.
Myshkin’s goodness fails not because it is false, but because it demands too much of a wounded soul. Absolute goodness does not negotiate with self-hatred; it dissolves the very narrative that sustains it. For Nastasya, to be loved without condition would mean confronting the possibility that her suffering was unjust — and that possibility is more terrifying than death. It would mean that the world is not merely cruel, but wrong. And if the world is wrong, then her pain demands a reckoning that cannot be satisfied by self-destruction alone.
This is why Myshkin’s presence accelerates Nastasya’s collapse rather than preventing it. Goodness, when it is complete, exposes evil without containing it. Myshkin does not possess the authority of Christ, only the vulnerability. He can forgive, but he cannot redeem. He can love, but he cannot save. His goodness is human — and therefore tragic.
Dostoevsky stages this tragedy with surgical precision. Each time Myshkin approaches Nastasya with compassion, she responds with theatrical cruelty — mocking herself, humiliating her suitors, sabotaging her own escape. These acts are not madness; they are protest. Nastasya refuses to be redeemed quietly. If she is to be destroyed, she will ensure that the spectacle indicts everyone watching.
The novel’s final convergence — Myshkin and Rogozhin keeping vigil over Nastasya’s corpse — represents the collapse of all moral binaries. Love as possession and love as mercy meet in silence. Neither triumphs. Myshkin’s mind breaks not because he has failed, but because he has seen too much without the power to intervene. Absolute goodness, confronted with absolute despair, does not become heroic — it becomes mute.
The Idiot thus dismantles a comforting illusion: that goodness is inherently salvific. Dostoevsky insists on something far more disturbing. Goodness, when it is unprotected by power, tradition, or authority, is fragile. It reveals truth without enforcing it. And truth, once revealed, does not automatically heal — it often destroys.
Prince Myshkin is not the savior of the novel; he is its ethical measure. Nastasya Filippovna is not merely a tragic woman; she is the novel’s moral accusation. Together, they form Dostoevsky’s bleakest question: What happens when perfect compassion meets a soul that cannot survive without self-condemnation?
The answer is not redemption. It is tragedy — not because goodness is insufficient, but because the world is not yet capable of receiving it.
A haunting descent into love, war, betrayal, sexual violence and the unbearable intimacy of witnessing
There are plays you watch.
There are plays you experience.
And then there are plays that make you question the morality of sitting in a theatre seat at all.
SARAJEVO belongs to the last category.
I walked into Theatre on the Square in Sandton knowing that I was going to see an award-winning play. I knew the reputation. I knew the Naledi Awards had crowned it four times. I knew it had been celebrated for its writing, direction and performances.
I did not know that I would leave feeling as though I had witnessed something I was never supposed to see.
There is a warning waiting for you before you enter the auditorium:
“WARNING: THE PLAY DEPICTS THEMES OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE, EXPLICIT LANGUAGE AND THEMES OF AN ADULT NATURE.”
Believe it.
The warning is not decorative theatre etiquette. It is a door.
Behind that door are bullets, blood, profanity, desire, French kisses, nudity, fractured friendships, collapsing identities, sexual violence and human beings attempting to remain human while history tears the world apart.
And somehow, amid all of it, the most frightening thing is not the war.
It is how intimate everything feels.
The sex feels real.
The affection feels real.
The hatred feels real.
The friendships feel real.
The betrayal feels real.
And when violence arrives, it does not feel choreographed.
It feels lived.
That is the great achievement of SARAJEVO.
It does not simply tell us about war.
It makes us feel what it means to be close enough to smell it.
FOUR Naledis. ONE DEVASTATING PLAY.
The accolades tell their own story.
At the 21st Naledi Theatre Awards, covering productions staged during 2025, SARAJEVO won four major awards:
Best Production of a Play.
Best Director of a Play — Thorsten Wedekind.
Best Lead Performance in a Play (Female) — Aimée Mica Komorowsky.
Best Breakthrough Performance in a Play — Ivan Nedeljkovic.
It was also nominated in seven categories, including Best New South African Script/Adaptation, Best Supporting Performance in a Play (Male), and Best Theatre Set- and AV Design.
Those awards are impressive.
But after sitting through SARAJEVO, I understand something about awards:
Sometimes they are not really awards.
Sometimes they are attempts to put a frame around something that refuses to be contained.
SARAJEVO is one of those works.
Written by Aimée Mica Komorowsky and directed by Thorsten Wedekind, the play has its roots in the war-torn former Yugoslavia and centres on the collapse of friendship under the pressure of ideology, nationalism, fear and violence. The current production follows Mirela, Aleksander and Slobo, childhood friends whose shared world is progressively destroyed by conflict, while Peter, a South African photographer, enters their lives as an outsider and witness.
And that word matters:
witness.
Because ultimately, that is what the audience becomes.
Witnesses.
And SARAJEVO asks what happens when witnessing becomes unbearable.
BEFORE THE WAR: WHEN THEY WERE JUST PEOPLE
Before history turns them into categories, they are simply friends.
Mirela.
Aleksander.
Slobo.
Three people bound by childhood, familiarity and the ordinary intimacy of knowing another person before the world tells you what you are supposed to think about them.
That is what makes the destruction so painful.
They do not begin as enemies.
They begin as people who know one another.
They have memories.
They have jokes.
They have desire.
They have arguments.
They have bodies.
They have dreams.
They have a shared history.
And then Yugoslavia begins to fracture.
The political becomes personal.
National identity becomes weaponised.
Fear becomes a language.
The old world begins disappearing.
And the people who once occupied the same emotional territory suddenly discover that they are expected to belong to different sides.
This is one of the play’s most devastating insights:
war does not begin when the first bullet is fired.
It begins earlier.
It begins when people stop seeing one another as people.
It begins in suspicion.
In slogans.
In whispered accusations.
In the question of who belongs.
In the moment when someone’s name, ethnicity, religion or political identity becomes more important than the person carrying it.
The official production description speaks of “countless small fractures” — silences, suspicions and impossible choices — rather than one single event destroying the friendship.
And that is precisely why the play hurts.
The friendship does not simply explode.
It decays.
One crack.
Then another.
Then another.
Until eventually you look at the people who once loved one another and realise that the distance between them has become a battlefield.
ENTER PETER: THE CAMERA AND THE QUESTION OF WITNESSING
Then comes Peter.
A South African photographer entering this Balkan catastrophe from outside it.
He carries a camera.
And the camera is important.
Because Peter is not merely a character.
He is a question.
What does it mean to watch another person’s suffering?
What does it mean to photograph pain?
What does it mean to enter someone else’s war and then leave?
What does it mean to be an observer when observation itself changes the relationship between you and the people being observed?
Peter comes searching for something beyond the life he left behind, but the conflict gradually destroys the comfortable distinction between observer and participant.
And sitting in the auditorium, I felt the same problem being transferred onto me.
I was watching.
That was my job.
I had bought a ticket.
I had taken my seat.
The actors knew I was there.
The director wanted me there.
The theatre had invited me to witness.
But when the violence became unbearable, I began wondering whether witnessing is always morally innocent.
That is where SARAJEVO becomes psychologically dangerous.
Because it turns the audience into Peter.
We watch.
We cannot intervene.
We cannot stop the war.
We cannot rescue Mirela.
We cannot undo what has happened.
We cannot climb onto the stage and tell the characters that they are actors.
Because for approximately two hours, they do not feel like actors.
They feel like people.
And that is terrifying.
AIMÉE MICA KOMOROWSKY: NOT ACTING, BUT LIVING
I have watched great performances.
I have watched technically brilliant performances.
I have watched performances where I admired the actor’s control, timing, voice, physicality and emotional intelligence.
But Aimée Mica Komorowsky did something different to me.
She disappeared.
Mirela was not being performed in front of me.
Mirela was there.
Komorowsky is also the playwright, meaning the body inhabiting Mirela is the same artistic consciousness that created the world surrounding her. The Naledi judges recognised that extraordinary work by awarding her Best Lead Performance in a Play.
But an award does not explain what it feels like to watch her.
There were moments when I stopped seeing technique.
I stopped seeing choreography.
I stopped seeing theatre.
I saw a woman.
A woman loving.
A woman desiring.
A woman frightened.
A woman trying to understand what is happening to her country.
A woman trying to preserve some fragment of herself while the world around her becomes unrecognisable.
Her emotional life does not feel presented to us.
It feels exposed.
And that is why the performance is so devastating.
There is no protective glass between performer and audience.
She does not say:
“Look at me acting.”
She seems to say:
“Look at what happened to me.”
And that is a completely different relationship.
LOVE BEFORE DESTRUCTION
One of the reasons the play’s violence hits so hard is because SARAJEVO allows tenderness to exist first.
The lovers touch each other.
They kiss.
They flirt.
They laugh.
They fuck.
They desire.
There is nudity.
There are French kisses.
There is profanity so natural and constant that it becomes part of the texture of the world rather than some theatrical attempt to shock.
And this matters.
Because the play refuses to sanitise human beings.
War does not transform people into symbols.
They remain sexual beings.
They remain jealous.
They remain horny.
They remain affectionate.
They remain cruel.
They remain funny.
They remain frightened.
They remain capable of falling in love while bombs are falling around them.
This is one of the most important things SARAJEVO understands:
The body does not stop being a body because history becomes horrific.
People still want to touch.
They still want to be touched.
They still want to kiss someone.
They still want to sleep beside someone.
They still want to feel another human being against their skin and pretend, for a few seconds, that the outside world has disappeared.
And perhaps that is why the intimacy feels so dangerous.
The lovers are not merely having sex.
They are trying to preserve humanity.
THEN THE BULLETS BEGIN
The bullets become part of the soundtrack.
Not music.
Not melody.
Bullets.
Gunfire interrupts intimacy.
Violence interrupts conversation.
History interrupts desire.
The soundscape refuses to let the audience forget that somewhere beyond whatever private moment is occurring, the world is collapsing.
And that contrast is brutal.
A kiss.
A gunshot.
A touch.
A bullet.
A laugh.
A scream.
A moment of tenderness.
A moment of terror.
This is not war as spectacle.
It is war as intrusion.
The battlefield enters the bedroom.
The political enters the lovers’ embrace.
The national enters the personal.
And eventually there is nowhere left to hide.
THE RAPE: WHEN THE AUDIENCE BECOMES A BYSTANDER
Then comes the scene that I cannot simply describe as “disturbing.”
It is more complicated than that.
It is horrifying.
And what disturbed me most was not simply what was happening on stage.
It was the fact that I was watching it happen.
The warning had prepared me intellectually.
It did not prepare me emotionally.
The sexual violence is staged with an uncompromising physicality. The victim’s clothing is violently displaced; her bra is pulled down, her underwear is ripped away, and the assault proceeds before the audience.
There is no cinematic cutaway.
No convenient fade to black.
No comforting suggestion that something terrible has happened somewhere beyond our field of vision.
We see the violation.
We are forced to remain present.
And suddenly the theatre becomes morally uncomfortable.
Because the actor is not actually being raped.
I know that.
You know that.
The performer knows that.
But the image is real.
The humiliation is represented.
The body is exposed.
The struggle is visible.
The violence is communicated through physical action rather than safely narrated from a distance.
And the brain does something strange.
It understands the artifice while responding to the emotional reality.
That is where I became conflicted.
I felt like a bystander.
I felt complicit.
I wanted to look away.
But looking away felt like another form of participation.
And staying felt unbearable.
That is the genius — and the cruelty — of the staging.
The audience is denied the easy moral position of the spectator who can say:
“How terrible.”
We are made to experience something closer to:
“Why am I still sitting here?”
And then the answer arrives with brutal clarity:
Because I cannot stop it.
Because this is what bystanders experience.
Because watching violence without the power to intervene is its own psychological horror.
Because war creates millions of spectators who are not perpetrators, but who nevertheless find themselves standing near suffering with no ability to reverse it.
The scene is traumatic precisely because it does not allow sexual violence to become abstract.
It makes the violation bodily.
The pulled clothing.
The exposed flesh.
The forced penetration.
The struggle.
The terror.
The loss of control.
The humiliation.
And then the silence inside the audience.
That silence is almost as violent as the scene itself.
I could feel people processing what they had just seen.
No one knows what reaction is appropriate.
You do not laugh.
You do not applaud.
You do not want to breathe too loudly.
You sit there.
And you witness.
That is SARAJEVO at its most devastating.
It does not allow the audience to consume sexual violence comfortably.
It makes you sit with it.
And that is important because sexual violence in war is not simply about sex.
It is about power.
Possession.
Humiliation.
Control.
The destruction of dignity.
The reduction of a human being into a body that someone else believes they have the right to conquer.
The scene therefore becomes part of the larger argument of the play:
war does not only destroy buildings.
It destroys boundaries.
It invades bodies.
It corrupts intimacy.
It weaponises sex.
It turns the most private parts of human existence into battlefields.
And when the scene ends, the audience does not simply “move on.”
At least I couldn’t.
Something stays.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PLAY
The most frightening thing about SARAJEVO is that the violence is not its real subject.
Its real subject is what violence does inside people.
The play is psychological warfare disguised as historical drama.
Its battlefield is the mind.
The question is not merely:
Who is fighting whom?
It is:
What happens to a person when the world they understood collapses?
What happens when your childhood friend becomes your ideological enemy?
What happens when love becomes politically dangerous?
What happens when survival requires betrayal?
What happens when loyalty to your country conflicts with loyalty to your friend?
What happens when the person you once trusted becomes the person you fear?
And perhaps the darkest question:
How much of yourself can you surrender in order to survive before survival becomes another form of death?
That is where the play transcends Sarajevo.
It is about Sarajevo.
But it is not only about Sarajevo.
The production’s own creators describe its themes as identity, loyalty, betrayal and the human longing to hold onto something that is slipping away.
And those themes are universal.
Because every society has its versions of “us” and “them.”
Every generation invents categories.
Every political system can turn identity into ammunition.
Every friendship is vulnerable to ideology if the surrounding world becomes sufficiently poisonous.
THE COLLAPSE OF FRIENDSHIP
Perhaps the saddest character in SARAJEVO is not Mirela, Aleksander, Slobo or Peter.
Perhaps it is friendship itself.
Because friendship is supposed to exist before politics.
You know someone before you know their category.
You know how they laugh.
How they swear.
What they are afraid of.
What they look like when they are tired.
Who they love.
What makes them angry.
You know the human being.
Then society tells you:
No.
Forget the human being.
Look at the category.
Look at the flag.
Look at the ethnicity.
Look at the religion.
Look at the political allegiance.
And suddenly the person you once knew becomes a representative of something larger.
The friendship becomes impossible.
That is the tragedy.
War does not merely kill people.
Sometimes it kills the possibility that people can continue knowing one another.
THE SET: A WORLD THAT CANNOT REMAIN INTACT
The intimacy of Theatre on the Square becomes an important part of the production.
This is not a gigantic auditorium in which war can be safely converted into spectacle.
The theatre is close.
The audience is close.
The actors are close.
Bodies occupy the same emotional air as the spectators.
And that proximity makes everything more dangerous.
The stage becomes less like a constructed theatrical environment and more like a room in which something has gone horribly wrong.
The set does not need to compete with the actors.
It serves the psychological architecture of the play.
We are not invited into a museum reconstruction of Sarajevo.
We are brought into a world whose boundaries are constantly collapsing.
That is the appropriate visual metaphor.
The world itself is falling apart.
So the stage must feel unstable.
There is an extraordinary tension between the apparent simplicity of the theatrical environment and the enormous history being carried through it.
A room can become a home.
A home can become a place of intimacy.
That same intimacy can become a site of terror.
And suddenly the audience understands:
There is no safe room.
That is war.
LIGHTING: WHEN SAFETY DISAPPEARS
Lighting in a production like this cannot merely illuminate faces.
It has to manipulate psychological safety.
And SARAJEVO understands the power of darkness.
Light can create intimacy.
It can isolate a body.
It can expose.
It can conceal.
It can make a space feel private.
And then, in an instant, destroy that privacy.
That is particularly powerful when contrasted with the sexual intimacy of the play.
A kiss under one kind of light can feel almost sacred.
A body exposed under another can feel suddenly vulnerable.
The lighting therefore participates in the play’s central obsession:
visibility.
Who gets seen?
Who gets hidden?
Who is forced into the light?
Who disappears into darkness?
Peter carries a camera because he wants to see.
The audience sits in darkness because we want to see.
The characters are desperate to hide because being seen can become dangerous.
And the play keeps asking whether seeing is salvation or violation.
THE SOUND OF WAR
Then there are the bullets.
The gunfire is not merely an effect.
It becomes punctuation.
A sentence can be interrupted by a bullet.
A kiss can be interrupted by a bullet.
A memory can be interrupted by a bullet.
Silence can be interrupted by a bullet.
The sound of war becomes the sound of a world that no longer allows people to control the rhythm of their own lives.
And that is why the bullets become the soundtrack.
The war does not need a narrator.
It announces itself.
IVAN NEDELKOVIC: THE BREAKTHROUGH THAT HURTS
Ivan Nedeljkovic won the Naledi for Breakthrough Performance in a Play, while also being recognised in the Supporting Performance category for SARAJEVO.
And there is something remarkable about his presence.
Slobo is not simply another participant in a war.
He is another human being caught inside the machinery of history.
Nedelkjovic gives the character the instability that the play requires.
He can be affectionate.
He can be volatile.
He can be vulnerable.
He can become frightening.
He can seem like somebody you recognise.
And then something changes.
That change is essential.
Because the most terrifying monsters in history rarely begin as monsters.
They begin as people.
They begin with grievances.
With fears.
With loyalties.
With wounds.
With ideologies.
And then the ideology starts speaking louder than the human being.
That is what makes the performance so painful.
DAMON BERRY: THE OUTSIDER WHO CANNOT REMAIN OUTSIDE
As Peter, Damon Berry occupies the peculiar position of the outsider.
He is the camera.
The witness.
The foreign body inside this intimate catastrophe.
But the more he sees, the less possible it becomes for him to remain detached.
And that is another of the play’s great psychological ideas:
You cannot witness suffering forever without being changed by what you have witnessed.
Peter arrives with the possibility of observation.
He encounters reality.
Reality does not ask his permission before entering him.
ANDRÉ LÖTTER: ALEKSANDER AND THE HUMAN COST OF FRACTURE
André Lötter’s Aleksander exists at the centre of the play’s emotional architecture.
Because Aleksander is part of that original triangle.
The friendship matters because these people had a life before the war.
And that “before” becomes increasingly painful as the production proceeds.
Every memory becomes evidence of what has been lost.
Every moment of tenderness becomes a ghost.
The past does not disappear.
It becomes a haunting.
THORSTEN WEDEKIND: DIRECTION WITHOUT MERCY
Thorsten Wedekind won Best Director of a Play at the Naledi Awards.
After seeing SARAJEVO, I understand why.
Because he does not protect the audience.
He does not soften the ugliness.
He does not allow the production to become a tasteful historical drama about sad things that happened a long time ago.
He brings the audience dangerously close.
The production’s creators have described it as an intimate experience that asks audiences to come closer and hold their breath in shared silence.
That is exactly what the direction accomplishes.
Closer.
Closer to the actors.
Closer to the bodies.
Closer to the sex.
Closer to the profanity.
Closer to the violence.
Closer to the moral question.
And once we are close enough, there is nowhere to hide.
EXPLICITNESS AS TRUTH
Some audiences will be disturbed by the profanity.
Some will be shocked by the nudity.
Some will be uncomfortable with the sex.
Some will struggle with the violence.
Good.
Because SARAJEVO is not a play about comfortable people living in comfortable circumstances.
The explicitness is not there merely to titillate.
It creates texture.
People swear when they are frightened.
They swear when they are angry.
They swear when they fuck.
They swear when they are grieving.
They swear when they are trying not to cry.
The bodies are naked because bodies are naked.
People kiss because people kiss.
People have sex because people have sex.
People are violated because war destroys the boundaries that should protect the human body.
The play does not sterilise human existence.
And therefore, when the violence arrives, it does not feel like a sudden genre change.
It feels like the same world becoming monstrous.
THE CENTRAL QUESTION: WHAT DOES WAR DO TO LOVE?
This may be the question that stayed with me most.
Because SARAJEVO is not simply a war play.
It is a love story trapped inside a war.
And war is the ultimate enemy of intimacy.
Love says:
You are an individual.
War says:
You are a category.
Love says:
I know you.
War says:
I know what you represent.
Love says:
Come closer.
War says:
Choose a side.
And eventually the lovers, friends and witnesses are forced to decide whether they can continue seeing one another as human beings when the world around them insists that they see enemies.
That is the tragedy.
Not merely that people die.
But that people lose the ability to recognise one another.
WHY THE RAPE SCENE MATTERS
The sexual assault is not an ornamental shock tactic.
It is the moment when the play’s philosophy becomes physical.
Throughout SARAJEVO, the body is a place of intimacy.
The body kisses.
The body embraces.
The body desires.
The body makes love.
Then the body becomes a battlefield.
The rape destroys the meaning of touch.
That is why the scene is so traumatising.
A kiss earlier in the play communicates:
I trust you.
The assault communicates:
Your body no longer belongs to you.
The contrast is devastating.
The same physical language that previously expressed love becomes a language of domination.
And the audience is forced to witness the transformation.
That is not easy theatre.
It should not be.
Sexual violence should never be made comfortable.
THEATRE AS WITNESS
There is something uniquely cruel about live theatre.
A film can cut away.
A novel can turn the page.
A television series can pause.
But theatre happens in front of you.
The actor is breathing.
The audience is breathing.
The room is real.
The silence is real.
The bodies are physically present.
And so when SARAJEVO depicts violence, the mind knows it is theatre while the nervous system responds as though something real is unfolding in front of it.
That contradiction is the source of the production’s power.
I knew it was a play.
I knew nobody was actually being raped.
I knew the actors would eventually stand, breathe, change costumes and return to their lives.
But for those moments, the emotional truth was real.
And that is why I felt complicit.
The play had turned me into a witness.
And witnessing is uncomfortable because it carries responsibility.
What do we do with what we have seen?
What happens when the lights come back on?
Do we simply return to dinner?
Do we applaud?
Do we walk out into Sandton and continue our evening?
That is the uncomfortable brilliance of SARAJEVO.
It makes the distance between the theatre and the real world feel much smaller.
THE AFTERLIFE OF THE PERFORMANCE
The official material says the production is about friendship, love and the devastating human cost of war.
That is accurate.
But after experiencing it, I would add something:
It is about memory.
What survives when everything else has been destroyed?
A friendship?
A photograph?
A body?
A kiss?
A betrayal?
A name?
A story?
A theatre production?
The play itself becomes an act of remembering.
Its earlier iteration, Cheers to Sarajevo, was featured in the Routledge Handbook on Historical Reenactment and was connected to an international workshop examining sexual violence in war and its trans-generational effects. The work has also travelled internationally, including to festivals in Austria, Ottawa, Rwanda and Kosovo.
That history matters.
Because SARAJEVO is not simply pretending that something happened.
It is asking what it means to keep remembering that it happened.
And perhaps that is theatre’s most sacred function.
To refuse disappearance.
THE BEST PLAY IN SOUTH AFRICA?
After four Naledis, calling SARAJEVO one of South Africa’s best plays is not hyperbole.
The judges already made the institutional argument.
Best Production.
Best Director.
Best Lead Performance.
Best Breakthrough Performance.
But awards cannot explain the feeling of sitting in that auditorium.
For me, SARAJEVO became something more intimate.
It became the rare theatrical experience where I stopped analysing the craft because I was too busy surviving the experience.
I was not thinking:
Wonderful acting.
I was thinking:
Please let this end.
I was not thinking:
What clever staging.
I was thinking:
Why am I watching this?
I was not thinking:
What a convincing performance.
I was thinking:
This feels real.
And that is the highest compliment I can give Aimée Mica Komorowsky.
She did not make me believe that Mirela was real.
She made me forget that Mirela was fictional.
THE FINAL CURTAIN
When the lights eventually return, the war is not finished inside you.
The bullets have stopped.
The bodies are no longer moving.
The actors have become actors again.
The stage is a stage again.
The theatre is Theatre on the Square again.
Sandton is outside.
Johannesburg is outside.
The cars are moving.
People are talking.
Somebody is probably ordering dinner.
And yet something has changed.
Because for a short while, we were in Sarajevo.
We saw friendship disintegrate.
We saw ideology infect intimacy.
We saw love attempt to survive history.
We saw the human body become a battlefield.
We saw sexual violence represented without the comforting distance of abstraction.
We saw a photographer struggle with the morality of witnessing.
We saw people become strangers.
We saw strangers become witnesses.
And we were witnesses too.
That is what makes SARAJEVO haunting.
Not the bullets.
Not the nudity.
Not the profanity.
Not even the rape scene.
It is the realisation that the people on stage are not fundamentally different from us.
They want love.
They want safety.
They want belonging.
They want to be understood.
They want their friends to remain their friends.
They want to touch somebody and feel safe.
They want to wake up tomorrow.
And then history arrives.
That is all it takes.
History arrives.
And suddenly the ordinary becomes impossible.
SARAJEVO is a play about war, but its deepest subject is the fragile architecture of being human.
It asks how much violence a person can witness before they are changed.
How much ideology a friendship can withstand.
How much betrayal love can survive.
How much trauma a body can carry.
How much memory a generation can inherit.
And whether, after everything has been destroyed, we can still recognise one another.
That is why the warning at the entrance matters.
It tells you there will be sexual violence.
It tells you there will be explicit language.
It tells you there will be adult themes.
But it cannot warn you about the most devastating thing:
how real it will feel.
Because SARAJEVO does not feel acted.
It feels lived.
And perhaps that is why Aimée Mica Komorowsky’s Mirela broke something open in me.
Perhaps that is why the rape scene left me feeling like a bystander.
Perhaps that is why the intimacy felt almost indecent in its realism.
Perhaps that is why the bullets sounded less like theatrical effects and more like an invasion.
Perhaps that is why, when the curtain fell, I did not feel entertained.
I felt haunted.
And isn’t that what the greatest theatre sometimes does?
It does not give you an evening.
It gives you a wound.
SARAJEVO is that wound.
A wound shaped like friendship.
A wound shaped like war.
A wound shaped like love.
A wound shaped like a woman’s violated body.
A wound shaped like a photograph.
A wound shaped like a theatre seat from which you could do nothing but watch.
And when you finally walk back out into the world, you realise:
The play has ended.
But you are still its witness.
SARAJEVO
Written by: Aimée Mica Komorowsky Directed by: Thorsten Wedekind Mirela: Aimée Mica Komorowsky Slobo: Ivan Nedeljkovic Peter: Damon Berry Aleksander: André Lötter
Venue: Theatre on the Square, Sandton Return season: 5–22 August 2026 Awards: 4 × Naledi Theatre Awards
Best Production of a Play Best Director of a Play — Thorsten Wedekind Best Lead Performance in a Play (Female) — Aimée Mica Komorowsky Best Breakthrough Performance in a Play — Ivan Nedeljkovic
The Three Brothers as One Divided Soul: Psychological Fragmentation in The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky did not write The Brothers Karamazov to tell the story of three brothers. He wrote it to expose the fracture at the heart of modern humanity.
Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha are not simply siblings shaped by circumstance; they are embodiments of a single divided soul—passion, reason, and faith torn apart and forced to live separately. Their tragedy is not merely familial but existential: what happens when the human self can no longer hold its contradictions together?
Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, their father, is less a character than a moral vacuum. He bequeaths his sons not guidance or love, but chaos. In this absence of paternal authority—ethical, emotional, and spiritual—each brother develops one aspect of humanity in isolation. The result is not wholeness but extremity.
Dmitri: The Tyranny of Desire
Dmitri Karamazov is the most visibly alive of the brothers—and the least integrated. He lives in his body, in sensation, in appetite. His passions erupt uncontrollably: love and hatred, generosity and cruelty, ecstasy and despair coexist without mediation. Dmitri does not calculate; he confesses. He does not conceal his excess; he suffers it openly.
Yet Dostoevsky does not reduce Dmitri to mere hedonism. Beneath his sensuality lies a desperate hunger for moral purity. Dmitri longs to be redeemed even as he sabotages himself. He experiences guilt not as reflection but as torment. His conscience burns rather than instructs.
Dmitri’s tragedy is that his moral intuition is stronger than his self-control. He knows good and evil viscerally, but he lacks the inner structure to choose consistently between them. As a result, he becomes the perfect scapegoat. Society condemns him not because he is guilty of murder, but because he looks guilty. His chaos makes him believable as a criminal.
Dmitri represents what happens when desire is severed from reason and faith: passion becomes self-destructive, even when it yearns for goodness.
Ivan: The Sovereignty of Reason
Ivan Karamazov lives at the opposite pole. Where Dmitri is excess, Ivan is restraint. Where Dmitri erupts, Ivan withdraws. He seeks moral clarity through intellect, believing that if the world can be understood, it can be endured.
Ivan’s brilliance is undeniable. He sees through sentimental pieties and refuses easy consolations. His rebellion against God is rooted in compassion, not pride. He refuses a universe that demands the suffering of innocents as its price.
Yet Ivan’s reason becomes tyrannical. By isolating intellect from love and humility, he transforms moral outrage into metaphysical despair. His famous conclusion—“everything is permitted”—is not a declaration of freedom but a logical abyss. Without transcendence, moral law dissolves into personal will.
Ivan’s breakdown reveals the limits of reason when it bears the entire weight of existence. His hallucinations and conversations with the devil are not signs of superstition but of psychological collapse. Reason, when forced to answer questions it cannot resolve, turns against itself.
Ivan represents modern consciousness at its most honest—and most vulnerable. He exposes the cracks in rational morality but offers no shelter from the storm he unleashes.
Alyosha: The Courage of Faith
Alyosha Karamazov appears, at first, to be the least dramatic brother. He is gentle, attentive, and spiritually inclined. Yet this apparent simplicity is deceptive. Alyosha is not naïve; he is courageous. His faith is not inherited certainty but chosen vulnerability.
Alyosha does not deny the reality of evil. He witnesses cruelty, hypocrisy, and suffering without retreating into abstraction. Unlike Ivan, he does not demand cosmic justification. Unlike Dmitri, he does not surrender to passion. Instead, he responds with what Dostoevsky calls “active love”—a love that acts without assurance of success or reward.
Crucially, Alyosha’s faith is tested and nearly shattered. The corruption of Zosima’s body undermines the expectation of sanctity. No miracle intervenes. Faith survives not because it is proven, but because Alyosha chooses to remain open to love despite disappointment.
Alyosha represents the integration that the other brothers lack: faith that does not suppress reason or deny desire, but orders them toward compassion.
One Soul, Three Failures
Read together, the brothers form a psychological trinity. Dmitri is will without discipline. Ivan is intellect without mercy. Alyosha is love without domination. None is complete alone.
Dostoevsky’s genius lies in refusing to let any single brother represent the “correct” way to live. Dmitri’s passion contains moral sincerity; Ivan’s reason contains ethical rigor; Alyosha’s faith contains humility. Yet each, in isolation, fails.
The novel suggests that modern humanity suffers not from the absence of values, but from their fragmentation. We think too much without loving, desire too much without understanding, believe too much without acting—or act without believing.
The result is inner civil war.
Patricide as Psychic Event
The murder of Fyodor Pavlovich is the novel’s central crime—but it is also a symbolic act. Each brother, in his own way, desires the father’s death. Dmitri through rage and rivalry. Ivan through intellectual detachment and moral abdication. Alyosha through spiritual transcendence.
Smerdyakov commits the act, but he does so as the embodiment of the brothers’ disowned impulses. He is their shadow—the consequence of fragmentation. When responsibility is divided, guilt becomes collective.
This is Dostoevsky’s most unsettling insight: when the self fractures, moral agency disperses. No one feels fully responsible, and evil becomes easier to commit.
Toward Wholeness
The Brothers Karamazov is not a novel about choosing between faith, reason, or passion. It is a novel about the necessity of holding them together. Wholeness, Dostoevsky suggests, is not purity but integration.
Alyosha points toward this possibility, but even he is not its completion. The novel ends not with resolution, but with a call—to remember, to take responsibility, to love actively in an imperfect world.
The three brothers are not rivals; they are fragments searching for reunion. And in recognizing ourselves in each of them, we confront the deepest question Dostoevsky asks: can the modern soul survive its own division?
Crime and Punishment: When an Idea Commits a Murder
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is often misread as a novel about guilt, redemption, or the psychology of crime. While it contains all these elements, at its core the book is something far more unsettling: a novel about an idea that takes physical form—and kills.
Dostoevsky does not begin with murder. He begins with thought. Specifically, with a modern thought: that reason, if pushed far enough, can replace morality.
Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov is not merely poor, desperate, or unbalanced. He is intellectually intoxicated. His crime emerges not from impulse but from theory—from the belief that humanity is divided into two categories: the ordinary and the extraordinary. The former must obey the law; the latter may transgress it in the service of a higher purpose. History, he believes, is moved forward by such men. Napoleon becomes his unspoken model: a figure whose crimes were retroactively sanctified by success.
This belief marks Raskolnikov as the true heir of modern consciousness. Where the Underground Man remained paralyzed by self-awareness, Raskolnikov crosses the threshold into action. Dostoevsky escalates the philosophical problem posed in Notes from Underground: what happens when a man stops arguing with morality and attempts to overcome it?
The answer is not liberation. It is collapse.
The murder of the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna is not portrayed as dramatic or cathartic. It is clumsy, panicked, almost banal. Worse still, it does not go according to plan. Lizaveta’s unexpected appearance forces Raskolnikov into a second, unintended murder—already undermining the fantasy of rational control. The idea that crime can be clean, purposeful, and justified collapses at the very moment it is enacted.
From this point onward, Crime and Punishment becomes less a narrative and more a psychological autopsy.
Raskolnikov does not emerge empowered. He becomes feverish, disoriented, fragmented. His body rebels against his mind. He sleeps excessively, rambles incoherently, oscillates between arrogance and despair. Dostoevsky insists on a crucial truth: the psyche is not neutral territory. It cannot accommodate the lie that one is beyond good and evil.
This is one of Dostoevsky’s most radical claims. Punishment does not begin in the courtroom or the prison. It begins immediately, internally, and involuntarily. Long before the law reaches Raskolnikov, truth does.
What makes Raskolnikov’s suffering particularly modern is that it is not rooted in remorse for the victim. His torment stems from something more corrosive: the realization that he is not who he imagined himself to be. He wanted to prove his extraordinariness. Instead, he discovers his ordinariness in the most humiliating way possible—through weakness, confusion, and guilt.
Dostoevsky frames this as a metaphysical failure. Raskolnikov’s crime exposes the falsehood at the heart of rationalist morality: that human beings can reduce life to calculations without consequence. The novel relentlessly dismantles this notion. Every attempt Raskolnikov makes to justify himself only deepens his isolation.
Against him stands Sonya Marmeladova—perhaps the most misunderstood character in the novel. Sonya is often reduced to a symbol of Christian purity or passive suffering. In reality, she represents a radical ethical alternative to Raskolnikov’s logic.
Sonya does not justify suffering; she bears it. Forced into prostitution to support her family, she embodies moral degradation without moral corruption. Where Raskolnikov commits violence in the name of an abstract future good, Sonya sacrifices herself in the present for the survival of others. Dostoevsky places them in direct opposition: reason without love versus love without justification.
Crucially, Sonya never argues Raskolnikov out of his theory. She does not debate him. She listens, weeps, and remains. Dostoevsky suggests that salvation is not intellectual but relational. Truth does not arrive as a concept; it arrives as a presence.
This is why Raskolnikov’s confession does not occur in the interrogation room but in Sonya’s company. She gives him the cross not as a symbol of dogma but as a burden to be accepted. To suffer consciously, Dostoevsky implies, is already to begin returning to reality.
Porfiry Petrovich, the examining magistrate, represents another crucial dimension of the novel. Unlike conventional detectives, Porfiry does not rely on evidence alone. He relies on time, pressure, and psychological insight. He understands that Raskolnikov’s real enemy is not the law but himself.
Porfiry’s brilliance lies in his patience. He knows that guilt seeks expression, that the mind cannot indefinitely conceal what the soul knows. His interrogations are philosophical traps rather than procedural ones. In Porfiry, Dostoevsky anticipates modern psychology: crime as a form of confession delayed.
Yet even Porfiry does not complete the arc of punishment. That belongs to Siberia.
One of the novel’s most misunderstood aspects is its ending. Readers often expect a dramatic conversion or spiritual revelation. Instead, Dostoevsky offers something far more restrained—and far more honest. Raskolnikov does not suddenly become virtuous. He remains proud, resistant, emotionally distant. Redemption is not instantaneous; it is embryonic.
This is vital. Dostoevsky refuses cheap transcendence. Punishment, in the novel, is not the sentence imposed by the state but the slow dismantling of a false self. Siberia is not hell; it is exposure. Removed from his intellectual fantasies, Raskolnikov is finally forced to inhabit time, labor, and suffering alongside others.
Only at the very end does Dostoevsky allow the possibility—not the certainty—of renewal. The emphasis is deliberate. Redemption is not a narrative conclusion but a lifelong process. What matters is that Raskolnikov has ceased to believe in his own exceptionality.
This is the novel’s ultimate warning.
Crime and Punishment is not merely about murder; it is about what happens when human beings believe they can stand above moral law without paying a psychological and spiritual price. Dostoevsky foresaw a world increasingly governed by systems, ideologies, and rational justifications for violence. His novel asks a question that remains urgently relevant: what happens when ideas forget the human beings they consume?
Raskolnikov’s tragedy is not that he kills an old woman. It is that he tries to live as if love, conscience, and suffering are negotiable. Dostoevsky answers him with brutal clarity: they are not.
In the end, Crime and Punishment is not a condemnation of thought, but of thought severed from compassion. It insists that no theory, no matter how elegant, can absolve a human being from the reality of other human lives. And when an idea commits a murder, it does not remain intact. It destroys the mind that carried it.
That is Dostoevsky’s enduring terror—and his enduring truth.
Notes from Underground and the Birth of Modern Consciousness
There is a reason Notes from Underground feels less like a novel than an exposure. It does not invite sympathy, nor does it offer development or redemption. Instead, it stages a consciousness that knows too much, feels too sharply, and cannot move without tripping over itself. What Dostoevsky gives us here is not a character to be understood, but a mode of being that would come to define modernity.
The Underground Man is not mad. He is not mistaken. He is, disturbingly, lucid. And it is this lucidity — corrosive, recursive, merciless — that makes him feel so contemporary. In him, Dostoevsky inaugurates a form of consciousness that no longer trusts reason, no longer believes in progress, and no longer experiences the self as unified or innocent. This is not the romantic self, nor the rational Enlightenment subject. It is something darker: a self conscious of its own consciousness, and trapped inside it.
Hyper-consciousness as Illness
“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man.”
The opening declaration is not metaphorical. The Underground Man’s illness is not physical, nor even psychological in the clinical sense. It is excess awareness. He feels everything too much, thinks everything too far, anticipates every possible humiliation before it occurs. Action becomes impossible because action would require simplification, and simplification feels dishonest.
This is the first crucial break Dostoevsky introduces: consciousness is no longer a tool for clarity, but a source of paralysis. To be aware is not to be free; it is to be immobilised by competing motives, imagined judgments, and retrospective shame.
The Underground Man knows the reasons for action — and knows equally well the reasons against them. Every impulse is instantly undermined by reflection. Every desire is followed by contempt for having desired at all. What remains is inertia, accompanied by an inner monologue that never rests.
Modern consciousness begins here: not with doubt, but with self-surveillance.
The Collapse of Rational Optimism
Dostoevsky is writing against something very specific: the 19th-century belief that human beings, if shown their true interests, will act rationally and morally. The Crystal Palace — the utopian symbol of perfect rational organisation — looms in the background as an unspoken antagonist.
The Underground Man refuses this vision with fury.
He insists, scandalously, that human beings will choose suffering over happiness if happiness is imposed. That they will act against reason simply to prove they are free. That two times two equalling four is not liberation, but a wall.
This rejection is not philosophical abstraction; it is existential. A life governed entirely by rational calculation leaves no room for unpredictability, contradiction, or desire. It reduces the human being to a mechanism. The Underground Man’s spite is, at its core, a protest against being explained away.
Here, modern consciousness announces its rebellion: I would rather be wrong than reduced.
Freedom as Negativity
What is striking about the Underground Man is that he does not advocate an alternative system. He offers no better ethics, no new social arrangement. His freedom is purely negative. It exists only as refusal.
He will not be cured.
He will not be reconciled.
He will not be made happy by force.
This is not heroic resistance. It is ugly, self-defeating, often cruel. But it is recognisably modern. Freedom is no longer experienced as harmony between self and world, but as the ability to say no — even when that no leads to suffering.
The Underground Man prefers conscious misery to unconscious contentment. At least misery belongs to him.
This is a profound shift in the understanding of agency. Freedom becomes inseparable from self-sabotage. Choice is validated not by outcomes, but by its capacity to negate expectation.
Memory as a Weapon Turned Inward
If hyper-consciousness paralyses the Underground Man in the present, memory tortures him endlessly. He does not remember selectively; he remembers obsessively. Every slight is preserved, replayed, reimagined. Past humiliations are not digested — they are cultivated.
This is not nostalgia. It is a form of self-harm.
The Underground Man rehearses conversations that ended years ago, sharpening insults that were never delivered, reliving moments of shame with increasing cruelty toward himself. Memory becomes a private theatre of accusation, with the self as both defendant and prosecutor.
Here, Dostoevsky anticipates something deeply modern: the inability to let experience settle. The past does not recede; it accumulates. Identity becomes a sediment of unresolved moments.
Modern consciousness, in this sense, is haunted consciousness.
Self-Knowledge Without Consolation
What makes Notes from Underground so unsettling is that the Underground Man is rarely wrong about himself. He sees his own pettiness, his cowardice, his cruelty — and this insight does not redeem him. It merely adds another layer of contempt.
This is not the Socratic faith that self-knowledge leads to virtue. It is its inversion. Knowing oneself can deepen despair. Reflection does not heal; it corrodes.
Dostoevsky refuses the comforting arc in which awareness leads to growth. Instead, he presents consciousness as a closed circuit, feeding on itself. The Underground Man is not deluded — he is incapable of forgetting himself.
In this, Dostoevsky anticipates the crisis of modern subjectivity: when introspection no longer promises salvation, only endless recursion.
The Birth of the Anti-Hero
Before the Underground Man, literature gave us rebels, sinners, romantics, outcasts — but rarely this. This is not rebellion against society, but rebellion against coherence itself. The Underground Man does not want to belong, but neither does he want to escape. He wants to remain underground, where contradiction can be preserved without resolution.
He is not admirable. He is not instructive. He is not tragic in the classical sense. He is something new: an anti-hero whose defining trait is consciousness itself.
From this figure will descend a lineage of modern voices: fractured narrators, unreliable selves, interior monologues that expose rather than clarify. The Underground Man marks the moment when literature stops reassuring us that understanding leads somewhere better.
Why He Still Disturbs Us
The enduring discomfort of Notes from Underground lies in its refusal to distance the reader. The Underground Man does not represent a pathology safely contained in fiction. He articulates impulses we recognise and would rather deny: the pleasure of resentment, the intimacy of grievance, the strange comfort of self-inflicted misery.
He speaks from a place that modern life continually reproduces: the isolated self, over-informed, over-aware, inwardly verbose, outwardly inert. A consciousness flooded with explanations but starved of meaning.
Dostoevsky does not ask us to agree with the Underground Man. He forces us to acknowledge that this form of consciousness exists — and that it may be closer to us than we care to admit.
Conclusion: A Beginning, Not an Ending
Notes from Underground is not a diagnosis and not a prophecy. It is a beginning. With it, Dostoevsky cracks open the modern self and refuses to close it again.
The Underground Man is what remains when rational optimism collapses, when faith is wounded, when freedom turns inward and becomes destructive. He is the cost of consciousness without transcendence, awareness without grace.
In giving him a voice, Dostoevsky does not solve the problem of modern consciousness. He names it. And once named, it becomes impossible to ignore.
The Big Bad Musical – Putting the Wolf on Trial and Fairy Tales on the Witness Stand
There is something magical about walking into a theatre for the very first time.
The architecture is unfamiliar. The corridors have no memories attached to them. Every light, every seat, every curtain feels like the beginning of a relationship waiting to happen.
That was my experience at the Roodepoort Theatre.
A beautiful venue with an undeniable sense of occasion. We were fortunate enough to sit right at the front, close enough to hear every laugh, witness every expression and become completely immersed in the world unfolding before us. It was my first visit, but if The Big Bad Musical is any indication of what this theatre offers, it certainly won’t be my last.
Produced by Stageworx, The Big Bad Musical (16–30 July 2026) takes one of humanity’s oldest storytelling traditions—the fairy tale—and gleefully turns it inside out. Written by Alec Strum, with original music and lyrics by Bill Francoeur, additional music and new songs by Matthew Marinus, musical direction by Gemma Marinus, and directed by Timothy Le Roux, the production asks an unexpectedly profound question beneath all its comedy:
What if history has misunderstood the Big Bad Wolf?
It is a question that transforms the familiar into something wonderfully unpredictable.
Instead of lurking in dark forests waiting for innocent victims, the Wolf finds himself standing before a courtroom.
Justice, rather than revenge, takes centre stage.
The audience becomes the jury.
Suddenly childhood memories become evidence.
Every fairy tale needs heroes and villains.
This musical suggests that perhaps neither exists quite as neatly as we remember.
The courtroom setting is inspired. It allows beloved characters from different fairy tales to collide naturally while exposing how unreliable stories can become after centuries of retelling.
The Big Bad Wolf insists he has been the victim of terrible public relations.
The Fairy Godmother prosecutes with unwavering confidence.
The Evil Stepmother—ironically one of fairy tales’ most notorious villains—becomes the Wolf’s defence attorney.
Immediately the production announces its intentions.
Nothing is sacred.
Everything is funny.
The audience’s role elevates the experience beyond passive theatre.
We are no longer simply watching.
We are participants.
Jurors.
Every testimony, every joke and every musical number quietly asks us to make a decision.
Can someone escape their reputation?
Can a villain rewrite history?
Or are some actions impossible to forgive?
Personally, my verdict was simple.
Bad.
The Wolf may passionately insist he has become a vegan.
An admirable lifestyle choice.
Unfortunately, there remains the rather awkward matter of eating Red Riding Hood.
And her grandmother.
Eating people remains difficult to defend in any legal system.
Then there are the Three Little Pigs.
The Wolf openly admits he huffed.
He puffed.
He demolished a house.
When the evidence includes property destruction and attempted meals involving humans, centuries of “bad publicity” begin to resemble… accurate reporting.
The theatre itself reflected this delightful uncertainty.
Some audience members believed the Wolf had genuinely been misunderstood.
Others remained unconvinced.
Conversations erupted throughout the auditorium as strangers debated innocence and guilt like seasoned lawyers. After hearing the audience’s views, the Judge ultimately ruled the Wolf…
Bad.
Justice, it seems, prevailed.
One of the production’s greatest strengths is its refusal to treat its fairy-tale characters as cardboard cut-outs.
Every familiar face possesses personality.
They have opinions.
Flaws.
Vanity.
Humour.
Unexpected intelligence.
The production understands that audiences already know these characters.
Rather than introducing them, it reinvents them.
Musically, the production keeps its playful momentum through an energetic collection of songs that continuously push the story forward.
“Good or Bad” introduces the central question with infectious energy.
“Good Guy” cleverly explores reputation.
“Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” transforms childhood familiarity into theatrical spectacle.
“The Wolf Likes Grandma’s Clothes” embraces absurdity with complete confidence.
“He Huffed and Puffed” turns one of literature’s most famous acts of destruction into comic musical theatre.
“I Cried Wolf” gives new life to another timeless tale.
Then comes perhaps the evening’s funniest question:
“How Does Nobody Know What a Tuffet Is?”
To be perfectly honest…
Neither do I.
The mystery remains unsolved.
“This Wolf’s a Vegan” may well be one of the production’s most delightfully ridiculous ideas, while “Good or Bad (Reprise)” provides a satisfying conclusion that reminds us the trial has never really been about wolves.
It has always been about judgement.
The performances breathe vibrant life into every page of the script.
Jessica Driver delivers a commanding Fairy Godmother whose authority never overshadows her wit. She balances courtroom confidence with fairy-tale sparkle, making for a delightful prosecutor determined to expose the truth.
Bulelo Landman embraces the challenge of portraying a Wolf who is equal parts charismatic, suspicious, amusing and perpetually defensive. His performance keeps the audience guessing, and even when his explanations become increasingly unbelievable, he remains thoroughly entertaining.
Among the evening’s greatest highlights is John Tsenoli as the Judge.
His timing is exceptional.
His reactions are priceless.
He anchors the courtroom while allowing the comedy to flourish around him, creating many of the production’s loudest laughs. Every entrance, interruption and verdict lands with confidence, proving that authority figures can be every bit as funny as the accused.
Siba Dyaphu delivers an inspired Evil Stepmother whose role as defence attorney is one of the production’s cleverest ideas. Watching one of fairy tales’ most infamous villains passionately defend another supposed villain creates delicious dramatic irony.
Kristy Suttner, portraying both Grandmother Hood and The Shepherd, demonstrates impressive versatility, giving two distinct personalities equal charm.
Evanca Moolman‘s Miss Muffet adds playful energy and perfectly complements the production’s whimsical spirit.
Neo Diabeng Kele captures Red Riding Hood with warmth, innocence and confidence, becoming an important emotional thread throughout the trial.
Jade Kabatznik, as Pig Three, contributes wonderfully to the production’s ensemble chemistry, while Aidan Mc Arthur Antonio, as Pig Two, ensures the pigs’ side of the story is heard with humour and conviction.
Malakai Marinus, portraying The Boy Who Cried Wolf, gives fresh life to another classic character, reminding us that truth has always been a complicated thing in fairy tales.
No performance feels forgotten.
Every actor contributes to a colourful theatrical tapestry where ensemble work matters just as much as individual brilliance.
Visually, the production delights in the familiar.
The costumes immediately identify each character while allowing their personalities to shine beyond the stories that first made them famous. The courtroom setting cleverly unifies characters from different fairy tales into a single believable world, creating an imaginative playground where wolves, pigs, fairy godmothers and nursery-rhyme legends coexist effortlessly.
Perhaps what impressed me most was the production’s understanding of comedy.
Comedy is rhythm.
Timing.
Listening.
Reaction.
The biggest laughs often arrive not through dialogue alone but through pauses, glances and perfectly timed expressions. The cast demonstrates an excellent understanding of this delicate craft, allowing the humour to arise naturally rather than forcing it.
The result is a production filled with warmth, laughter and genuine audience participation.
Performance art has always possessed a remarkable ability to reimagine familiar stories.
It asks us to return to worlds we thought we already understood, only to discover something entirely new waiting beneath the surface.
The Big Bad Musical achieves exactly that.
It transforms childhood nostalgia into an evening of laughter, music and surprisingly thoughtful reflection. It reminds us that stories evolve, perspectives shift and reputations can always be challenged—even if, after hearing all the evidence, the verdict remains exactly the same.
The Wolf had his day in court.
He pleaded his case.
He blamed bad publicity.
He even claimed to be vegan.
But some evidence simply cannot be ignored.
He ate people.
He destroyed homes.
And after hearing every witness, every song and every argument, the jury—and ultimately the Judge—reached the only conclusion that felt right.
Bad.
As the curtain fell and the applause echoed through the beautiful Roodepoort Theatre, one thing became abundantly clear.
Justice had been served.
And theatre, once again, reminded us why live performance remains one of humanity’s greatest art forms.
It invites us not merely to watch stories.
It invites us to become part of them.
Congratulations Timothy Le Roux and the whole team for a great show and a deserved standing ovation.
The Discovery of the Unconscious: A Divided Inheritance
There is a temptation to speak of the unconscious as though it were a single territory—mapped, named, conquered. But what the history of depth psychology actually reveals is something more unsettled: the unconscious was not discovered once, but repeatedly, and each discovery contradicted the last.
What emerged between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not a unified theory of the hidden mind, but a series of competing visions of what it means to be human beneath consciousness. Freud, Jung, Janet, Adler, and Charcot were not collaborators in a single project; they were rivals in a struggle over meaning, causality, and agency. What they disagreed about—often bitterly—was not whether the unconscious existed, but what kind of thing it was.
Was it a storehouse of forbidden desire?
A fracture caused by trauma?
A symbolic inheritance older than the individual?
A mistaken life plan shaped by social striving?
Or simply a neurological mystery expressed through the body?
Each answer reshaped the modern self.
Charcot: Making the Invisible Visible
Jean-Martin Charcot stands at the threshold of the unconscious, not as its theorist, but as its exhibitor. At the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, Charcot demonstrated something deeply unsettling: the body could produce paralysis, convulsions, blindness, and pain without any organic lesion. Symptoms appeared, disappeared, and migrated under hypnosis.
This alone was enough to rupture the medical imagination of the time.
Charcot treated hysteria as a neurological condition, but his work undermined neurology itself. If suggestion could provoke symptoms, then symptoms were not merely mechanical failures. The body, it seemed, was responding to meanings it could not articulate.
Charcot did not ask why the symptoms appeared. He asked how they could be produced and reproduced. In doing so, he created the clinical space in which the unconscious could later be interpreted. He did not give it language, but he gave it a stage of evidence.
The discovery here was not theoretical. It was epistemological: what cannot be consciously intended can still act.
Janet: The Unconscious as Breakdown
Pierre Janet moved the inquiry inward. Where Charcot revealed the symptom, Janet investigated the structure of the mind that produced it. His central concept—dissociation—offered a vision of the unconscious radically different from Freud’s.
For Janet, the unconscious was not a reservoir of hidden wishes. It was the consequence of psychological failure.
Trauma, in Janet’s view, overwhelms the mind’s capacity to integrate experience. Certain memories, sensations, or impulses become split off, operating as autonomous systems. These dissociated elements do not seek expression; they repeat mechanically. Symptoms are not symbolic disguises but psychological automatisms.
What is striking about Janet’s model is its austerity. There is no drama of desire, no mythic depth. There is only a weakened capacity for synthesis. The unconscious is not mysterious—it is unfinished.
Janet’s therapy aimed not at interpretation but at restoration: strengthening consciousness, reconnecting fragments, stabilising attention. In many ways, his work anticipates contemporary trauma psychology, which treats symptoms less as messages than as frozen responses.
In Janet’s hands, the unconscious is not a secret life. It is what happens when experience exceeds the mind’s ability to hold it.
Freud: The Unconscious as Conflict
Freud inherits Charcot’s symptoms and Janet’s fragmentation—but transforms both into psychological drama. What Freud adds is meaning, and with it, conflict.
For Freud, the unconscious is dynamic. It does not merely contain forgotten material; it actively resists consciousness. Its contents—wishes, impulses, fantasies—are repressed because they are incompatible with social law, morality, or the ego’s self-image.
Symptoms, then, are compromises. They are the distorted fulfilment of forbidden desires. Dreams, slips of the tongue, neurotic rituals—all become expressions of a psyche divided against itself.
This is Freud’s radical move: he universalises the unconscious. It is not the result of trauma alone, nor a sign of weakness. It is constitutive of subjectivity.
To be human is to be in conflict with oneself.
Freud’s unconscious is also deeply historical. Childhood becomes the origin point of adult life, sexuality the organising force of the psyche. Whether one accepts these specifics or not, Freud’s larger claim endures: reason is not sovereign. Insight is hard-won, resisted, and never complete.
What Freud discovered was not simply the unconscious, but the unsettling idea that self-knowledge has an enemy within.
Jung: The Unconscious as Inheritance
Jung breaks with Freud at the point where desire becomes too small a language. For Jung, the unconscious cannot be reduced to personal history alone. Beneath the personal unconscious lies a deeper layer: the collective unconscious, structured by archetypes.
These archetypes are not inherited ideas but inherited forms—patterns of experience that shape how humans imagine, fear, love, and transform. Dreams, myths, and religious symbols are not disguises of repressed wishes; they are expressions of a psyche oriented toward meaning.
Where Freud sees conflict, Jung sees dialogue. Where Freud interprets, Jung listens.
Jung’s unconscious is not only disruptive; it is compensatory. It corrects the one-sidedness of consciousness, offering images that guide the individual toward wholeness. The goal is not mastery, but individuation: the slow integration of conscious and unconscious life.
This vision re-sacralises the psyche without returning to theology. It treats the unconscious as a source of wisdom—but at a cost. Jung’s symbolic language risks abstraction, and his universals can flatten historical and social specificity.
Still, Jung preserves something Freud discards: the idea that the unconscious is not merely a problem to be solved, but a dimension of being.
Adler: The Unconscious as Strategy
Alfred Adler offers the most pragmatic revision of depth psychology. Rejecting both Freud’s libido theory and Jung’s mythic structures, Adler reframes the unconscious in terms of purpose.
For Adler, behaviour is not driven by buried causes but by hidden goals. The unconscious is not where the past hides—it is where unexamined life strategies operate.
Feelings of inferiority, experienced early and universally, give rise to compensations. Personality becomes a creative response to perceived weakness. Symptoms, in this view, are not expressions of repressed desire or symbolic messages; they are mistaken solutions to life’s problems.
Adler’s emphasis on social interest grounds psychology in ethics and community. He insists that mental life cannot be understood in isolation from relational contexts. The unconscious is not a private abyss but a socially shaped orientation.
What Adler loses in depth, he gains in agency. His psychology asks not “What happened to you?” but “What are you trying to achieve?”
A Fragmented Discovery
What Ellenberger’s history makes unavoidable is this: the unconscious has no single essence. Each thinker discovers what their method allows them to see.
Charcot finds the body responding to meaning.
Janet finds minds split by overload.
Freud finds conflict and repression.
Jung finds symbols and inheritance.
Adler finds strategy and striving.
Together, they dismantle the illusion of a unified self. The modern subject emerges as layered, divided, goal-oriented, symbolic, and socially embedded—all at once.
Perhaps the true discovery of the unconscious is not any particular theory, but the recognition that selfhood is unstable, and that understanding ourselves requires multiple, incompatible languages.
The unconscious resists closure because it names not a place, but a limit: the point where consciousness fails to account for what we do, feel, and become.
And that limit, once discovered, cannot be undiscovered.
Amy Winehouse: Three Albums, One Voice Refusing to Disappear
Amy Winehouse did not arrive as a tragedy. She arrived as a mind.
Frank (2003) is where that mind first announced itself — sharp-tongued, jazz-literate, emotionally guarded. At nineteen, Amy sang like someone already tired of being underestimated. Her voice moved with the looseness of jazz, but her lyrics cut with the precision of a young woman who had already learned how intelligence could function as armour. Frank is playful, cruel, observant. It is an album about control — emotional, sexual, intellectual. Here, Amy does not fall in love; she studies it. She names imbalance. She refuses emotional labour. Songs like “Stronger Than Me” and “Fuck Me Pumps” are not merely witty — they are defensive maneuvers. On Frank, Amy keeps herself at a distance. She is present, but never exposed.
That distance disappears on Back to Black (2006).
This is the rupture. The collapse. The moment where wit can no longer protect the heart. Musically, Back to Black turns away from contemporary gloss and runs straight into the arms of Black American musical memory — Motown, girl groups, torch songs, the ghosts of Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday. Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi build a world that sounds timeless, but the pain inside it is immediate. There is no irony here, only clarity. Amy names her flaws without apology: “You Know I’m No Good.” She jokes her way around danger in “Rehab.” She stands at the edge of abandonment in the title track and does not scream — she accepts. Back to Black is devastating because it documents knowing better without doing better. Love is not redemptive; it is a losing game. And Amy sings this not as theory, but as lived fact.
If Frank is the mind and Back to Black is the wound, then Lioness: Hidden Treasures (2011) is the echo.
Released after her death, Lioness is not a statement album — it is residue. Demos, alternate takes, songs left unfinished. And yet, it may be the most intimate Amy ever sounded. Her voice here is closer to the microphone, closer to breath, closer to hesitation. There is less performance, more presence. Tracks like “Between the Cheats” and the original version of “Tears Dry on Their Own” strip away theatrical strength and leave vulnerability exposed. Listening to Lioness feels like being handed someone’s notebook without permission. It is not loud. It does not ask to be celebrated. It asks to be held carefully.
Together, these three albums form a rare and honest trilogy. Frank says: I know who I am. Back to Black says: I lost myself. Lioness whispers: I was still here.
What Amy Winehouse gave us was not just pain — it was articulation. She understood music history deeply, and she understood herself even more deeply. Her tragedy was not ignorance; it was awareness without rescue. And that is why her work endures. Not because she suffered, but because she told the truth while suffering — without polish, without moral framing, without asking for forgiveness.
To listen to Amy properly is to refuse to flatten her into myth. She was not only a voice. She was a writer, a thinker, a listener. Her albums do not beg for sympathy. They offer testimony. And if we are still listening — really listening — it is because that voice, cracked and brilliant, never lied.
The Bacchae – An African Choral Ballet: A Night When Johannesburg Reimagined a Greek Tragedy
There are evenings at the theatre that entertain. There are evenings that impress. And then there are evenings that completely redefine what one believes theatre can be.
The opening night of The Bacchae – An African Choral Ballet at Johannesburg’s Joburg Theatre belonged firmly in that final category.
Presented through the extraordinary collaboration between Joburg Ballet, the UJ Choir, and the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra, this was not merely a ballet. It was an operatic, choral, orchestral, theatrical and deeply African reimagining of one of humanity’s oldest tragedies. It was a production of immense ambition, staggering artistic confidence and astonishing execution.
As someone who considers Joburg Ballet one of South Africa’s greatest artistic institutions, my expectations were already incredibly high.
They somehow exceeded them.
The theatre was filled with anticipation long before the curtain rose. Every seat carried the electricity of expectation. Conversations buzzed throughout the auditorium as audiences gathered to witness something many already suspected would become an important moment in South African performing arts.
By the time the Epilogue concluded, there was no doubt.
This was a landmark production.
Ancient Greece Reborn Through Africa
The source material comes from The Bacchae, Euripides’ timeless tragedy written more than two thousand years ago.
Yet this production never felt like an ancient relic.
Instead, it felt immediate.
Relevant.
Alive.
The story follows Dionysus, the god rejected by his own people and denied his divinity by King Pentheus of Thebes. Dionysus returns to claim recognition—not simply through power, but by exposing human arrogance, pride and the illusion that reason alone can govern the world.
Standing opposite him is Pentheus, a ruler convinced that order and control are absolute.
Between them stand Agave, Cadmus, Tiresias and the citizens of Thebes, each forced to choose whether to resist or surrender to forces larger than themselves.
The tragedy is inevitable.
Pride meets divinity.
Order collides with ecstasy.
Human certainty collapses before the mysterious.
This African interpretation made those themes feel startlingly contemporary. Questions of leadership, identity, community, spirituality and power resonated far beyond the stage.
Neo Muyanga Creates a Modern Classic
The heartbeat of the production belongs to writer and composer Neo Muyanga.
His achievement cannot be overstated.
Rather than simply adapting Euripides, Muyanga creates an entirely new theatrical language where African musical traditions, classical orchestration and contemporary composition coexist naturally.
The score never merely accompanies the dancing.
It breathes.
It warns.
It mourns.
It celebrates.
Sometimes it whispers.
Sometimes it overwhelms.
The music possesses an almost spiritual quality, becoming another character inside the story rather than background accompaniment.
It feels ancient while sounding entirely modern.
It is haunting.
It is unforgettable.
It deserves to stand among the great original ballet scores produced in South Africa.
The Miracle of Movement
If the music is the soul, then the choreography by Mthuthuzeli November is the body’s language.
This is storytelling through movement at its highest level.
Not once did I feel the absence of spoken dialogue.
Every gesture carried meaning.
Every lift revealed emotion.
Every formation advanced the narrative.
The dancers did not simply execute choreography.
They became language itself.
There is extraordinary trust between every performer.
Every entrance is precise.
Every transition effortless.
Every ensemble sequence breathes together as though sharing one heartbeat.
November draws remarkable performances from every principal and every ensemble member.
The choreography demands supreme athleticism while never sacrificing emotional truth.
Technical excellence and dramatic storytelling become inseparable.
That is exceptionally rare.
The Story Told Across Three Acts
The production unfolds with magnificent dramatic architecture.
The Overture introduces Dionysus, Pentheus, Agave, Cadmus, Tiresias and the people of Thebes, quietly establishing relationships that will eventually explode into tragedy.
Act One witnesses the arrival of Dionysus and the gradual unsettling of the city. Through scenes including Community of Thebes, Cloak of Dionysus and the meeting between Cadmus and Tiresias, the tension grows almost imperceptibly.
By Act Two, ritual replaces certainty.
The Bacchanale sequence is hypnotic.
Pentheus enters determined to restore control, yet each encounter draws him deeper into Dionysus’ carefully constructed web. The temptation scene is especially compelling, demonstrating how pride often becomes the instrument of one’s own destruction.
Act Three delivers devastating inevitability.
The Rite of Dionysus gives way to the Tragedy of Pentheus before the cruel revelation reaches Agave with heartbreaking force.
The Denouement reminds us that this is not merely an ancient myth.
It is about us.
About every society that mistakes certainty for wisdom.
About every individual who refuses to see beyond themselves.
The Epilogue leaves silence where applause briefly hesitates—a silence born from genuine emotional impact.
Kitty Phetla: A Living Legend
Witnessing Kitty Phetla perform on stage was one of the great privileges of the evening.
She is not merely an accomplished dancer.
She is an institution.
A national treasure.
A legend of South African ballet.
Her portrayal of Dionysus possesses remarkable authority.
Every movement is economical yet filled with meaning.
She never needs exaggerated expression.
Presence alone commands attention.
She demonstrates exactly why generations of dancers regard her with such admiration.
Watching her felt like witnessing living history.
A Company Performing at the Highest Level
The entire cast deserves enormous praise.
Whether portraying divine power, royal authority, prophecy or the citizens of Thebes, every performer contributes to a unified artistic vision.
Monike Cristina, Latoya Mokoena, Revil Yon, Bruno Miranda, Mario Gaglione, Ryoko Yagyu, Chloe Blair, Ivan Domiciano and Thando Mgobhozi each bring individuality while serving the collective story.
No performance feels isolated.
Everything works together.
That unity is one of Joburg Ballet’s greatest strengths.
Their technical precision is breathtaking.
Their poise effortless.
Their grace astonishing.
Their artistry beyond question.
The UJ Choir: The Voice of the Gods
Perhaps the evening’s greatest surprise was the extraordinary impact of the UJ Choir.
Positioned at the rear of the stage, they became something far greater than musical accompaniment.
They became the conscience of the production.
Sometimes they sounded like ancient spirits.
Sometimes grieving citizens.
Sometimes divine judgement itself.
The sound was rich beyond description.
Haunting.
Powerful.
Beautiful.
There were moments when the harmony seemed to suspend time itself.
Under Choirmaster Sizwe Mondlane, the choir delivered a performance of exceptional discipline and emotional depth.
It is impossible to imagine this production without them.
The Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra
Supporting this immense artistic undertaking was the magnificent Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra.
Every phrase was played with sensitivity.
Every crescendo heightened the drama.
The orchestra provided the emotional landscape upon which dancers and singers built their performances.
Together with the choir, they created one of the most immersive theatrical soundscapes I have ever experienced.
Jay Pather’s Vision
Director Jay Pather deserves enormous recognition for bringing so many artistic disciplines into complete harmony.
Dance.
Music.
Theatre.
Choral performance.
Visual art.
African aesthetics.
Classical tragedy.
Nothing feels disconnected.
Everything serves one vision.
That level of artistic cohesion is extraordinarily difficult to achieve.
Yet throughout the evening the production flows naturally from beginning to end.
A Stage Painted in Africa
The visual world created by Jade Bowers together with the students of the UJ Faculty of Art deserves equal celebration.
The costumes burst with African identity.
Patterns.
Textures.
Colour.
Movement.
Everything feels intentional.
Nothing is decorative for its own sake.
The set complements rather than overwhelms the performers, allowing the dancers and music to remain central while creating an unforgettable visual identity.
Every scene becomes a moving painting.
Why This Production Matters
Productions like The Bacchae – An African Choral Ballet remind us why live performance remains irreplaceable.
No recording can reproduce the collective intake of breath before a dramatic reveal.
No screen can recreate the vibration of an orchestra filling a theatre.
No camera can fully capture the energy shared between dancers, choir and audience occupying the same space.
This production demonstrates what becomes possible when South Africa’s finest artistic institutions collaborate without compromise.
It honours an ancient Greek masterpiece while making it unmistakably African.
It celebrates classical ballet while embracing contemporary storytelling.
It respects tradition while refusing to be limited by it.
A Triumph for South African Theatre
When the final curtain fell, the standing ovation was immediate.
It was deserved.
Every artist involved had contributed something extraordinary.
Neo Muyanga had composed a modern masterpiece.
Mthuthuzeli November had transformed music into breathtaking movement.
Jay Pather had unified every artistic discipline into one unforgettable experience.
The UJ Choir and the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra elevated the production to almost spiritual heights.
Jade Bowers and the UJ Faculty of Art created a visual feast rooted proudly in African identity.
And Joburg Ballet once again demonstrated why it stands among the finest ballet companies in the country.
This was not simply an opening night.
It was an artistic event.
One that reminded everyone fortunate enough to be inside Joburg Theatre why great theatre has the power to move us beyond words.
Long after the applause faded, one feeling remained.
Wonder.
And the certainty that The Bacchae – An African Choral Ballet is destined to be remembered as one of the defining achievements of South African performance.
Congratulations Jay Pather and the whole team for a great show and a deserved standing ovation.
