Release notes

11 September 2026

More of what’s really on listings

A filter meant to tell stage shows apart from markets, fun runs and conferences was throwing away real productions. It judged a show partly by its venue’s name, so every listing at the Market Theatre was being discarded because “market” appeared in it. It also rejected perfectly good titles on single words — anything ending in “Tour”, plus plays called Run for Your Wife, Master Class and The Last Meal Experience.

It now reads the title and the venue separately, and a theatre we list by hand is always trusted for its own programme. Measured against shows we already knew were real, it was discarding 38% of them; that is down to 33%, and none of the remainder are at theatres we curate.

Two more theatres

• Guild Theatre, East London — we already listed the venue but were never reading its box office, so the Eastern Cape was missing nine live shows.
• TUT Theatre, Pretoria — new to the directory.

Genres you can trust

Anything we couldn’t classify used to be filed under Drama, which meant two thirds of the site carried that label and the Drama filter told you almost nothing. Unclassifiable shows now say Other. Expect the Drama count to look much smaller — that is the label finally being honest, not shows disappearing.

Province filters reach more shows

Around a third of listings had no province recorded, so the province filter simply never showed them. Where a town was known, the province is now worked out from it — and where it genuinely isn’t known, we leave it blank rather than guess wrong.

A new backdrop design

Faint theatre motifs — comedy and tragedy masks, a ticket, a stage light, curtains, a seat — are now woven into the background, and pick up whichever colour theme you’ve chosen.

10 September 2026

The Playhouse Theatre, Somerset West venues

Added, along with the care needed to keep it apart from Durban’s similarly-named Playhouse Company so Western Cape shows don’t end up filed in KwaZulu-Natal.

Venues can now also ask us to send their “Book” links to their own website instead of the ticketing page we found the show on. At The Courtyard in McGregor is the first to take that up.

6–9 September 2026

Weekly email, and safer backups

• The weekly newsletter now actually sends — one email a week with the stage shows opening near you.
• Monthly database backups, so the directory can be rebuilt if something goes wrong.
• Daily listings refresh moved off the top of the hour, which had been delaying it by hours.

August 2026

Earlier

• Pages for every theatre and city, so a venue’s full programme has a permanent link.
• Individual show pages where we have a real description to show.
• opdieplanke.co.za became the main address; isiteji.co.za still works.
• Mobile: collapsible filters, paging through the grid, and Afrikaans/isiZulu language filters.

What we’re working on next

• Prices on every listing. Shows sourced from Quicket currently arrive without one.
• Festivals as one venue. Aardklop is split across ten separate room listings instead of appearing as a single festival.
• Tidying venue names. Some venues were created automatically from whatever a ticketing site called them, and still read like raw addresses.
• Full run dates. Several box offices publish only a show’s opening date, so a production can drop off our listings while it is still running.
• More theatres — especially the many that sell only through their own websites.

Run a venue and want to be listed, or spotted something wrong? Tell us about a show or email contact@isiteji.co.za.