The Ballad of Briar Grant is a slightly surreal mystery with a story about personal change. It’s an ambitious piece of writing with some vignettes of brilliance, delivered confidently by director Lia Kelly and a theatre team who know what they’re about. And it does have a real ballad.
Saint Joan puts us into the mind of a young girl who led a revolution, to be betrayed by those her will and resolve had elevated. As the curtain closes on Flyleaf Theatre’s magnificently sparse re-creation of Bernard Shaw’s masterwork, an audience member behind us cried out, “Holy fuck!” I knew how she felt. We felt […]
OLEANNA at the Pumphouse Theatre throws us straight into a cauldron of miscommunication and abuse of power, the two actors delivering David Mamet’s hothouse of a play with nerve and aplomb.
Midnight Confessions is a pajama-party confessional revelling in the joy, naivety and confusion of teenage friendship and growing up. A love story to girlhood and a more innocent (physical) age.
Nicola Cheeseman is Back is a one-woman show about that one woman’s discovery that time runs as inexorably downhill as her now sagging body — that the big choice to make for anyone of any age, is to make your own choices — and to make them now — and then hang on for dear […]
THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER is one of those stories that everybody knows, but few have ever heard, and rarely as well delivered as this. It’s a poem, you know, by Coleridge — from the very dawn of the Romantic Era — full of ice and snow and haunting spirits who punish an evil […]
AIGA is Sāmoan for family/whānau. Family is what Lusi Faiva (Lusi’s Story, Tuapou, Mr & Mrs Jones) almost lost, as a child institutionalised with cerebral palsy, then rediscovered. It’s the support of her theatre family now that lifts her up, works with her, helps her tell her story.
BEFORE KARMA GETS US is what this is called. But what the hell “it” is I’m really still struggling to say. It was mime, it was magic, it was artifice. It was art. My partner reckons she has never laughed so hard. So if it’s anything at all, it’s a success.
RED MOLE: A ROMANCE is the only chance you may have in your lifetime to see a small glimpse of what some of us lucky ones still retain fragments of in our memories: of this theatre group performing live.
MEET ME AT DAWN messes with your mind. In a good way. It aims to cover a lot ground in its 65 minutes, and almost succeeds.
