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: In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play (Auckland Theatre Company)

March 20, 2012

A Play In Need of Its Own Treatment [by Rosabel Tan] We live in an age of sexual liberation: where mutual attempts to disentangle emotional and physical expressions of love are treated as an act of empowerment – friends with benefits, no strings attached. But whether they can be separated is another question altogether, and this is a focal point […]

REVIEW: The Twits (Auckland Theatre Company)

December 4, 2011

Nasty delights in an upside-down world [by James Wenley] Roald Dahl has a lot to answer for. His childrens stories, among them Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, and Fantastic Mr Fox are gruesome and subversive tales, in George’s Marvellous Medicine for example, 8 year old George is responsible for the death of his Grandmother (causing her to shrink […]