Life on a Loop brings theatre icon Ellie Smith back to the local stage for the first time in 17 years with her award-winning solo show, direct from London, throwing us with humour and heart straight into a care home. And if you’re in the right demographic, it zings!
The Dry House is confronting. We’re greeted with a small suburban lounge, a house full of debris, a selection of empty bottles, and Alison Bruce with a bad case of the shakes.
Tiri: Te Araroa Woman Far Walking gives us a 185-year-old woman born on the day the Treaty of Waitangi was signed.
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.
MONSTER IN THE MAZE “re-imagines” in modern opera the legend of Theseus, the Minotaur, and the annual slaughter of Athenian youth to that monster. It evokes therein the tragedy of refugees forced afloat on the Mediterannean, of hostages imprisoned, of youth slaughtered in war and famine, and (perhaps) of unnamed hazards felt by youth from […]
Hot off its 2024 run on Broadway, MOTHER PLAY has us packing and unpacking — emotions, family relationships, sexual orientations, living arrangements —all of them. All are unpacked, laid out, and put back. As our narrator Martha admits: she’s getting good at it.
It’s wonderful to attend the first performance of a bold new play exploring mighty themes, delivered with such power one leaves the theatre reeling. Unfortunately, I have to report that Auckland Theatre Company’s new production Mary: The Birth of Frankenstein is not that play.
Eight years in the making, premiering last night, Sam Brooks’ new black comedy A Rich Man confronts us with an unusually complex menage a quatre confronting, and evading, some difficult choices about the future and their past.
William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar sometimes seems like it has a cast of thousands. Last time we saw it in Auckland it had at least twenty. Last night, at the Basement Theatre with two actors and one effective sound and lighting manager, it had a cast of two. It was remarkable.
William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been done so many times in so many ways it has almost become a cliché. Almost. Almost. We’ve seen Baz Lurhmann do it as a brawl on Venice Beach, and Leonard Bernstein take it to a Westside Story. I’ve seen many different interpretations myself—but I’ve never seen it done as a […]
