[Keeping the Season Silly] Sleigh!, this year’s Basement Christmas show created by The Heartthrobs, is a fully improvised romp set in that most wonderful, strange and Christmassy of places: the mall. If you’ve seen Snort before, you’ll be familiar with the basic structure – the performers ask the audience for prompts around which they must then create a scene. (And […]
[Questioning Reality] The Writer by Ella Hickson is a play full of provocation. It asks questions it cannot answer. It challenges the dominant modes of theatre (and society) while still existing within them. What are we to take away from that? The back side of some set pieces sit on the stage. We can see right into the wings, where […]
[Laughing Through It] Grief, sex and race are not only three distinct words that sum up the themes and talking points of this comedy-musical, but the show also amalgamates them together to describe a unique experience and state of mind: the grief-sex-race. Creators and performers Jess Karamjeet and Sophie Gibson share fragments of their lives with us, centred around their […]
[On Writing] Why tell stories? According to Ruth Steiner, when we find a story that grips us, we must tell it; we are to seize it by the reins and not exorcise it from our mouths until it is all on the page. Why did Plumb Theatre decide on this story for their sixth production? That is the question I […]
[Ghost Story] On a rainy, wintery night, with the full moon shining bright, I cross the mists of dream and thought, to forget what is real, and what is not… The lights of The Pumphouse remain up as Michael Hurst enters the stage and begins to read from a large tome. He starts nervously to tell a tale – a […]
[Existing In Between] “Kūpapa (noun) collaborator, ally, — a term that came to be applied to Māori who sided with Pākehā opposition or the Government. There has been a shift from a general meaning of neutrality to the modern use, which now sometimes has derogative connotations; traitor.” – maoridictionary.co.nz This play, however, is no straightforward indictment of protagonist and historical […]
[The Wheel of Fortune] How do you want to be remembered when you’re gone? This is one of the central questions in Jean Sergent’s Change Your Own Life – one which she directly asks the audience. But this show is not a didactic self-help talk – far from it. What Sergent offers up instead is a deeply personal story of […]
[Pulling the Plug] The play begins in the foyer. The Basement bar area has been decorated with messages – I spot a myriad of advertisements among what appear to be snippets of conversations, perhaps emails or texts. This announces the central theme of You Are [Not] Alone Here: that our communication and relationships have become fractured through technology and consumerism. […]
[Speaking Freely] This year Basement theatre offered the provocation to artists of making documentary theatre for Fringe 2021. This is intended to democratize the theatre space; to make it more accessible and less elite. To put the lives of the everyperson front and centre and explore notions of authenticity. Outta the Mouths of Babes centres Jude Lowry, “a mother, grandmother […]
[Keeping the Light On] Three actors are on stage as we take our seats in Studio One Toi Tu. One clicks something on and off. One slowly pours sand into a bucket. One holds balloons and teases the audience with the thrill of popping them, but never does. From this set-up alone, I knew we had entered the realm of […]
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