REVIEW: My Name is Rachel Corrie (Shape Shift and Embers Collective)

December 3, 2018

[Looking Inward for Outward Action] “My name is Rachel Corrie”, states the energetic, impassioned, idealistic, empathetic, effervescent and blisteringly awake woman on Garnet Station’s Tiny Theatre stage. Character and actor alike are bright stars who collide to ensure we will not forget Rachel. Phoebe Borwick is a tour de force as the solo performer in the title role of Shape […]

REVIEW: Bright Star (Plumb Productions)

September 12, 2018

[Star is Born Again] Although set forty-four years ago in Dallas, Texas, Bright Star strikes a still very relevant chord in its handling of misogyny in the workplace, the conflicts between careers and family, and the challenges of a pursuit of excellence. Written by Stuart Hoar, the play follows a chapter in the life of Beatrice and Brian Tinsley, New […]

REVIEW: Filthy Business (Auckland Theatre Company)

August 28, 2018

[Business Smarts Required] It’s East London, 1968, and against all the odds, Jewish entrepreneur and matriarch, Yetta Solomon (Jennifer Ludlam) has built a thriving rubber business. A lavish set vivifies the business’s premises and shop – its worn bricks and mortar seemingly impregnated with the East End’s spirit of elbow grease and hustle, while offcuts of rubber and derivative belts, cushions, […]

REVIEW: O Nofoa – The Chairs – Sāmoan Season (Te Pou) [Two Reviews]

July 28, 2018

[Welcomed to the Fale] by Gabriel Faatau’uu Satiu Under the direction of Aleni Tufuga (also translated by him in gagana Sāmoa), O Nofoa serves as one part of Te Pou’s multilingual season of Eugene Ionesco’s play The Chairs. The show is an absurdist tragic farce. Paying homage to Ionesco’s absurdity through the deliberate nonsense and broadly stylized performance, the timing of […]

REVIEW: He Tūru Māu – The Chairs – Te Reo Māori Season (Te Pou)

July 20, 2018

[An Adventure into the Absurd] Reviewing theatre is a strange activity. It involves sitting self-consciously within and without your own viewpoint, inhabiting and interrogating your own responses to what’s on stage, striving for some kind of balance between subjectivity and objectivity. I say ‘striving for’, because I suspect this elusive balance doesn’t really exist; perhaps it’s more constructive just to […]

REVIEW: First World Problems (The Basement)

July 19, 2018

[Energy and Heart] In the curator’s own words, First World Problems is “a mischievous anthology of a show” – mischief abounds and anthology is the perfect structural description. Ahi Karunaharan has curated a project designed to explore and explode some of the contradictions, injustices, comedy, confusion and conflict belonging to South Asian experience in Aotearoa. With a cast of twenty […]

REVIEW: The Chairs – Pākehā Season (Te Pou)

July 13, 2018

[Park your Bum] Te Pou Theatre presents a night of absurdity, hilarity, and larger-than-life character work in its inaugural Pākehā season of Ionesco’s The Chairs. Opening Te Pou’s quadruplet of productions of The Chairs in different languages – Te Reo Māori, Samoan and Cantonese are to follow – the English language Pākehā show sets things off to an outrageously energetic start. […]

REVIEW: The Contours of Heaven (The Basement)

June 23, 2018

[Listen] Without doubt this was one of the best performances I have ever seen. The Contours of Heaven is a one woman tour-de-force performed by Ana Chaya Scotney and produced by Zanetti Productions. Originally created for the 2017 Harcourt’s Hawke’s Bay Arts Festival, it went on to win Best Theatre and Best Performance in the Auckland Fringe Festival, and is […]

REVIEW: The Cherry Orchard (Auckland Theatre Company)

June 16, 2018

[Mana Whenua] Chekhov’s final play finds itself uprooted from both its Russian origins and its familiar place within the Western theatrical canon in ATC’s latest production of The Cherry Orchard. It has been replanted, by several strokes of genius, in 1970’s Aotearoa – a New Zealand experiencing the death of the old new world, and the birth of a recogniseable […]

REVIEW: Morningstar (The Pumphouse)

June 8, 2018

[Dramatic Archangels] For the next eight nights, The Pumphouse stage is heaven – one year since the creation of Eden. In this first production of Albert Belz’s Morningstar, directed by Romy Hooper, a passionate host of archangels battle it out in a family feud of epic proportions. The gang are all there, though perhaps not quite as we know them […]

1 2