[Chunuk Stripped Bair] What a pleasure to be back at the Mercury Theatre tonight as a fitting period venue for Auckland Arts Festival’s and NZ Opera’s Brass Poppies. Clearly an important milestone in New Zealand’s development as a nation, and as a catalyst for breaking away from the “motherland” – this piece is brave, important and essential. In true Kiwi […]
[Down where it’s wetter] Entering the Spiegeltent for Meow Meow’s Little Mermaid is an experience in itself- on opening night there was an anticipatory queue even half an hour before the show started. We were ushered into an intimate in-the-round theatre with a thrust stage- my elbows were basically digging into my friend’s side for the whole show- yet this […]
[Lady in the Water] Inspired by her own love of swimming, and developed from an earlier short story, Alice Mary Cooper’s Waves is a piece of historical fiction that disguises itself as a true story. In fact, the presentation of the story was told so earnestly I didn’t realise the full extent of what was made up until I read […]
[Scotland plays no games] I have no interest in slaughtering the sacred cow that is the Bard as seen in The James Plays’ marketing and publicity quotes (“Better than Shakespeare” says the review quote on the poster). This is not for concern of offending Shakespearean purists, but due only to the inequitable comparison of three plays and a life’s works. […]
[Two Critics with the Egos of Three Kings] Critics Matt Baker and James Wenley went to the National Theatre of Scotland’s The James Plays over the weekend and podcasted their experience. Catch their conversation during the breaks of their nine hour theatre marathon. They saw James I on the Saturday night, and James II and III the next day. Find out the immediate reactions from the […]
[Invisible Woman] What does it mean to be the other? To be otherised is to be made invisible. To not only be unseen, but also to only be seen for what people think you are. You exist, simply, as blackness or a vessel. A void to be filled with contradictory stereotypes and assumptions. To be pigeonholed, tokenised or, worse, erased. […]
[In Praise of Shadows] In his famous essay on aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows, Japanese author Junichiro Tanizaki questions the traditional Western ideal of preferring the beauty of light over darkness, stating that the former can’t exist without the latter: “The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to […]
[Brave Faces] How do you approach an important subject such as domestic violence in a theatrically engaging manner without exploiting it? The most obvious thing would be to present it as truthfully as possible. But there’s a tendency for storytellers to take on causes that aren’t their own and attempt to suggest they know better. For the privileged to impose […]
[The Globe is full of Noises] The problem with The Tempest is that even with its self-awareness as a play, or perhaps in spite of it, it is not a dramatic work. Events of action both past and present are relegated to exposition. There is no onstage conflict; no scene in which two characters fight for opposing objectives. There are, […]
[Drowning in Illyria] It seems appropriate that a play which revolves around two shipwrecked siblings is victim to Auckland’s inconstant elements. While a rain-soaked atmosphere won’t be part of everyone’s Twelfth Night experience, the unpredictability of the weather is an integral part of attending the Pop-up Globe, especially for the exposed groundlings. The actors, despite having to compete with the […]
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