William Kentridge

Royal Academy, London ★★★★☆

Astonishments and violences fill the Royal Academy’s survey show of Johannesburg-born artist William Kentridge. Glimpses of hangings and torture, sex in the pool, old footage of a white hunter skipping towards the rhino he has just downed. Snatches of crackly operatic aria, lilting African song and paranoid voices on the telephone fill the air, along with the regular chink of a miner’s hammer against a rock. Kentridge’s show is filled with sounds and furies.

Now in his late 60s, Kentridge spent more than half his life living under apartheid. The system itself, and the complications of its aftermath, have been his key subjects.

The show includes animations, filmed performance and sculpture. Some motifs recur throughout – the megaphone, the stove-top coffee pot, the old-fashioned typewriter, the camera, trees and leaves and the pages of books, as well as a cast of characters, including the artist himself, lumbering through, balding, ageing, playing himself as a character as much as he is the work’s originator. Adrian Searle

Until 11 December