REVIEW: Conversations with Dead Relatives (The Basement)

April 5, 2018

[Badly Remembered or Forgotten?] “If you don’t know where you come from, how do you know where you’re going?” — Alex in Conversations Conversations with Dead Relatives is an intimate and heart-warming play written and performed by partners Alex Ellis and Phil Ormsby, and directed by Jennifer Ward-Lealand. Shifting between oral storytelling and dramatic re-enactment, the play begins all the […]

REVIEW: Sister Anzac (Stark Theatre)

August 25, 2016

[Honour & Horror] Theatre can do certain tones well. Visceral dread is not usually one of them. Sister Anzac is the rare drama that manages to feel like a completely theatrical yet horrifically immersive experience. Told from the perspective of three green New Zealand Red Cross nurses and their formidable matron, Sister Anzac (written by Geoff Allen) presents the battlefields of […]

REVIEW: Sister Anzac (Stark Theatre)

September 4, 2015

Women at war [by Sharu Delilkan] We’ve all seen numerous theatrical incarnations this year commemorating the centenary of WWI but one heralding women is definitely a departure from the norm. And that’s exactly what sets Geoff Allen‘s show Sister Anzac apart from the otherwise male dominated war stories. Inspired by Allen‘s grandfather A. S. Allen’s experience of ANZAC nurses on […]

REVIEW: A Model Woman (Flaxworks Theatre Company)

October 24, 2013

The Artist’s Muse [by James Wenley] For artists Einar and Gerda Wegener, 1920s bohemian Paris represents “exciting times”. War is over, cinema is changing the world, and in these enlightened times there is the sense that you can be whoever you want. Gerda (Alex Ellis), the portrait artist, is the “modern woman in trousers”, rejecting her gender’s traditional role; Einar […]

REVIEW: Drowning in Veronica Lake (Q Season)

August 30, 2012

The Fame Monster [by James Wenley] There’s commentary within this show about the difference between celebrity and stardom. Celebrity is flash in the pan stuff. Stardom is enduring. You counted. People remember. Movie femme fatale Veronica Lake has the ingredients for stardom – a troubled back-story, ambition, a face that lights up the screens. She was very much a screen […]

REVIEW: Drowning in Veronica Lake (Auckland Fringe)

March 8, 2011

Veronica lives on! [by Sharu Delilkan] Alex Ellis has got the whole package – the petite frame, platinum blonde hair and Veronica Lake’s signature peek-a-boo bangs, which became a phenomenon in the 1940s. She may be a lot taller than Lake was in real life (5 ft 11 in instead of 5 ft 2 in) but that doesn’t detract from […]