Last Call – Pitt St Theatre: September 24, 2025 (13th Floor Theatre Review)
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel … like going to Pitt St theatre. Where Stray Theatre are putting on a play about the end of the world—Last Call—exploring what and whom one would find most important in our last hours.
To be fair it’s mostly “whom” — when the going gets tough, some of the tough have gone to work. But many are taking the last chance to mend broken relationships, or to tell truths that couldn’t stay left unsaid.
Stray Theatre is an Auckland Uni theatre club committed to producing four shows every year. Last Call is an original work by club member Ollie Vahey Bourne. Her relationship writing is remarkably mature for one whose heart hasn’t (one hopes!) been broken so many times.
Fleshing out her play, given its very first performance last night, is a cast of ten—what would be troublesome numbers for some companies are ideal for a club where everyone will want to be on stage. The large number of characters gives the budding playwright a large web of relationships to reveal, feel and heal.
We entered the theatre to the quiet strains of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart.’ Given the play’s “hook,” I couldn’t help thinking it should have been ‘Transmission.’ But by the end, I think they were right. Love hadn’t gone far enough for some of these characters.
The stage was set with humdrum furniture suggesting a small town of some decades ago, flanked with a poorly-drawn telephone box and jailbars that should have been in front of a prisoner, we thought, not behind. The tech chosen (phones both bakelite rotary and plastic push-button) suggests we’re set several decades ago—necessary, after all, because if all had mobiles, then making contact would be much easier, with much less drama to perform!
These phones are key. Lighting with spots etc. worked well to focus on each given protagonist making or taking their calls. There were a few uncomfortable shadows on characters (and we wondered if we might have more sparkle and different tone colours for the pub scene?).
Phone-sound was effective, but we thought more could have been made of music —again, especially in the pub scene which calls for energy, noise and hubbub, even if the world is about to end. Given the decade, we wondered if characters could have been summonsed by refrains of ‘Hurry Up Harry’ (“We’re going down the pub/doo do doo do.” And maybe the pub was time for ‘Transmission’ (“And we would go on as though nothing was wrong/Hide from these days we remained all alone.”)
And to finish … well, a friend spoke afterwards of the last night in a bar before Covid lockup, when we really didn’t know if plague was coming—similar to the feeling here—and the evening there closed with Nina Simone’s ‘I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to Be Free.’ I wonder if something like that could have given us the full emotional finish it all cried out for.
But for amateur theatre produced wholly by enthusiasts this was a success. All the cast had clearly burrowed down into their characters , finding out how they tick. Marius Buxton confidently held the episodes together; Inaya Sinclair made the most of her few moments; Emily Haddon was the strong but bashful recipient of love. The stolidity of policemen James (York Tait) made his third-Act explosion all the more resonant, and even funny. All of the cast found the humour that was there in the text. But it was Forrest Murray who really made the most of them, playing with light and shade and an ease that had the audience howling at times.
Was it odd seeing the last day on Earth though such an ordinary cast of characters. Possibly. But this is intentional: we’re seeing “boring” lives transformed by the event, reminding us that we—all of us—need to not lose a moment when it comes to really living.
Carpe diem isn’t just a dumb Latin phrase.
Perhaps the quotidian characters made sense too. What could have been cheesy wasn’t, making it all the more believable.
I think we did feel a more emotional ending was needed. But we are left with a question: Can you have a happy ending when the world ends at midnight?
It’s a question I hope we never have to answer.
THEATRE PETER
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TRAILER HERE.
TICKETS HERE.
Interview here with producers and (some of the) cast.
Interview with the writer here.
More info here.
Writer: Ollie Vahey Bourne
Director: River Lancaster
PICTURE CREDITS MAX KÖING
