If you can't travel the 969km it takes to get to the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, don't despair. A broad selection of the festival's best productions are performed in Joburg every year as part of the annual 969 Festival at Wits Theatre (now in its 15th year).

The dozen shows featured during the two-week festival include drama, dance, comedy and children's theatre covering a wide range of topics including sexual harassment, ancestral histories, the fate of South Africa's so-called askaris (black people who acted as spies for the apartheid authorities), repressed sexuality and the Western Cape water crisis.