REVIEW: No Holds Bard (Auckland Fringe)

February 27, 2020

[Too Many Harks, Not Enough Bite] Part of any creative endeavour is reception – whether that is an audience of strangers or your cousin Larry. Even the most shy and self-effacing creative will inevitably have to put their labour love in front of another human being to gauge their reaction.  One of the worst aspects of doing any kind of […]

REVIEW: I Know What I’m Doing (Auckland Fringe)

February 27, 2020

[Relinquishing Control] Can we ever really feel like we know what we’re doing? Is what I do with my time worth something? I Know What I’m Doing is an experimental, tender and funny piece that tackles some of life’s biggest questions. Straight off the back of a season at the Sydney Fringe (2019), NZ artist Melody Rachel brings her unique […]

REVIEW: Deep (Auckland Fringe)

February 27, 2020

[Lost in the Dark] Deep is a puppet theatre production that follows the story of marine archaeologist Rebekah Poleman (Natasha Daniel) who gets untethered from her submarine and becomes stranded four-thousand feet below the ocean surface and with only an hour of oxygen to spare. The story traces Poleman’s encounters with various underwater creatures as she attempts to survive the […]

REVIEW: #UsTwo (Auckland Fringe)

February 27, 2020

[Sisterhood and Solidarity] With its name a clear nod to the #MeToo movement, it is reasonable to expect an engagement with power structures in #UsTwo. That this show roots the political within the personal is signalled right away by its intimate set, resembling a bedroom shared by two sisters. It is in this room that real-life siblings Catherine and Sarah […]

REVIEW: Game Face (Auckland Fringe)

February 26, 2020

[Playing by Different Rules] Content Notification: Discussion of eating disorders. Honest discussions of beauty and body image – and their truly damaging consequences – are still not common enough in our culture. Talking about eating disorders remains somewhat taboo and, despite many brands attempting to reframe themselves as allied with ‘body positivity’, we are still bombarded with messages about how […]

PREVIEW: Basement Theatre Season of Duration (Auckland Fringe)

February 25, 2020

[Time Lords] Critic and practitioner Nathan Joe previews the five 4-hour long durational shows taking place at Basement Theatre for Auckland Fringe 2020.  With the official announcement of Nisha Madhan as the new programming coordinator of Basement Theatre, it seems appropriate that the 2020 Auckland Fringe Basement Programme (her first Fringe in this position) has her artistic fingerprints all over […]

REVIEW: Leidy Lei’s Tainted Nightmare (Auckland Pride)

February 24, 2020

[Tainted Love] A small audience of about thirty people arrive into a large theatre. Most members seem to arrive from next door, where No Homo comedy played to a full house,and from the second row the empty stage feels too far away from the action. I hope our combined enthusiasm can create atmosphere for the drag stars as they perform.  […]

REVIEW: The Works of William Shakespeare by Chicks (Auckland Fringe)

February 20, 2020

[Playing with Plays] It’s a story we’ve heard before – Shakespeare’s works were not written by the man named William Shakespeare, but by someone else, or maybe even a group of people. The list of suspects usually ranges from Christopher Marlowe to Sir Walter Raleigh and Francis Bacon. But this show proposes something different: that the plays we all know […]

REVIEW: Get out of my Letterbox (Auckland Fringe)

February 20, 2020

[Theatre Time is different to Earth Time] Two women, a silver survey machine with the power to turn back time, dozens of bananas, and a pair of letterboxes are the difference between knowing who you think you are and finding out you are a quarter Costa Rican. Get Out of My Letter Box builds a world of wild imagination, subterfuge, […]

REVIEW: Provocation (Auckland Pride)

February 15, 2020

[Conversations with the Dead] Set in the afterlife, Aroha Awarau’s latest play Provocation is a study in grief. Not the grieving of others but the grief of oneself. Two gay men in limbo, confronted by the hate crimes committed against them, and desperate to find some sort of peace.  This isn’t the first time Awarau has mined the depths of […]

1 4 5 6 7