REVIEW: Twelfth Night: A Queer Reimagining (TAPAC)

February 26, 2024

Presented as part of the Auckland Pride Festival 2024, Arden Ensemble’s Twelfth Night was variously advertised as a lesbian reinterpretation, an LGBTQIA+ retelling, and a queer reimagining. ‘Reimagining’ may best fit the bill. Director Rose Herda and her players have staged a vibrant rendition of Shakespeare’s comedy that delivers the usual laughs and shenanigans — with an unmistakably contemporary feel.  […]

REVIEW: The Haka Party Incident (Te Pou)

June 7, 2023

The Haka Party Incident explores a little-known act of resistance — when Māori activist group He Taua confronted University of Auckland engineering students about their annual tradition of performing a mock haka. For decades, Māori students and lecturers had complained about the racist caricature, which engineering students insisted was just drunken fun. But the country was in the midst of […]

REVIEW: The Made (Auckland Theatre Company)

September 25, 2022

It may be one of the strongest images in our collective pop culture consciousness: Frankenstein’s monster rising from the operating table – the product of a young man playing god now set to wreak havoc on the world. The ‘creation scene’ in Emily Perkins’s The Made happens not at the beginning but roughly the halfway point. Scientist Alice (Alison Bruce)’s […]

REVIEW: Dawn Raids (Pacific Underground and Auckland Theatre Company)

August 27, 2022

Dawn Raids by Oscar Kightley was first staged by theatre collective Pacific Underground in 1997, 20 years after the national outrage. The play’s snapshot of the illegal raids on Pacific people under the guise of cracking down on overstayers would have hit home for everyone who experienced it — everyone whose families and friends had faced not only the violation […]

REVIEW: The Life of Galileo (Auckland Theatre Company)

June 29, 2021

[Use Science Wisely] The scene is 17th century Italy. Legendary astronomer Galileo Galilei is unsatisfied with what he has achieved in his life so far, and fixated on one subject in particular: the movement of the earth around the sun. Yet as Galileo tries fervently to share his discoveries with the world, it’s clear that there’s a big, black hole […]

REVIEW: The Haka Party Incident (Auckland Theatre Company)

April 4, 2021

[The Last New Zealand War] There’s something about watching local history onstage — history so recent that some members of the audience sitting beside you were participants in the events portrayed. Written and directed by Katie Wolfe, The Haka Party Incident is a resonant piece of documentary theatre revisiting what its advertising calls “the last New Zealand war.” This describes the […]

REVIEW: The Griegol (Auckland Arts Festival)

March 20, 2021

[Dark Craft] A darkened space; a crash of piano notes; a candle carried wordlessly onstage. A man plans his elderly mother’s funeral as his young daughter stands behind him, uncomprehending. All she has left of her grandmother is a key she cannot fit into any lock, and the stories her grandmother would spin of the Griegol, a shape-shifting demon made […]

REVIEW: Two Ladies (Auckland Theatre Company)

February 14, 2021

[Smartest in the Room] It was Lady Bird Johnson who said a first lady is “an unpaid public servant elected by one person, her husband.” Nancy Harris’s 2019 play Two Ladies puts the women in the shadows centrestage. Deliberately not-so-fictional, its titular ladies Hélène (Jennifer Ward-Lealand) and Sophia (Anna Jullienne) are transparently based on Brigitte Macron and Melania Trump; they […]

REVIEW: Black Lover (Auckland Theatre Company)

March 16, 2020

[A Kiwi Hero in Zimbabwe] When Sir Garfield Todd denounced racial injustice in 1950s Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), he was fiercely hated by supporters of white minority rule. Among the pejoratives they called him was “black lover”. Stanley Makuwe’s Black Lover is an illuminating glimpse into an overlooked chapter of history: a remarkable chapter which saw the Invercargill-born Todd become Prime Minister of […]

REVIEW: Carcinus Rex (Auckland Fringe)

February 28, 2020

[Crab Pincers and Prophecies] Most of us have heard of the deeply unlucky Oedipus, whether we are familiar with Sophoclean tragedy or Freud’s infamous Oedipus complex. Devised by Stray Theatre Company, Carcinus Rex offers a loose, highly comic interpretation of the story: What destiny awaits Carcinus, best crab in Thebes?  A group of squabbling gulls narrate the opening sequence, introducing […]

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