REVIEW: 8 Reasonable Demands (ATC Here & Now Festival)

April 27, 2019

A sobering look at the underbelly of Auckland’s queer community In 8 Reasonable Demands, playwright Joni Nelson asks the audience to consider the extent to which we take fundamental living standards for granted. At the ASB Waterfront Theatre, six characters find their lives upended by a life-changing decision to hold the government to ransom using leverage acquired by the use […]

REVIEW: Leon Wadham: Giddy (NZ International Comedy Festival)

May 10, 2018

[Sisyphus Smiles] An ecstatic delight, Leon Wadham’s Giddy is like a hot knife in butter, cutting through all the standup in the festival and making itself known. That’s not to discredit or undervalue the talent required for conventional forms of comedy writing, but there’s something special about a show so unashamedly kooky as Giddy is. Structured as a series of […]

REVIEW: Milky Bits (The Basement)

June 15, 2016

[Vision Boards A go-go] Three friends (Chris Parker, Hayley Sproull and Leon Wadham) are lost on a windy heath. After finding each other, they declare their mutual devotion and vow to return on the anniversary of their ordeal to celebrate their enduring bond. And that about does it for plot. When I first heard the title ‘Milky Bits’, I was […]

REVIEW: Lord of the Flies (Auckland Theatre Company)

September 8, 2013

Boys own Apocalypse [by James Wenley] Auckland Theatre Company’s stage production makes a nod to the usual medium the Lord of the Flies story is inherited: the secondary school classroom. A bookend, invented by Director Colin McColl and his cast, sets the leads as contemporary high-school students encountering William Golding’s 1954 novel. Project artwork of various pig heads, beasts and […]

REVIEW: The Pitchfork Disney (The Moving Theatre Company)

June 21, 2013

Well pitched [by Matt Baker] It’s taken Todd Emerson seven years to mount The Pitchfork Disney, and it’s easy to see why the play stuck with him after his initial reading of it. Premiering in England in 1991, the play is considered a first in the arrival of the “in-yer-face” generation of playwrights, including Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, and Anthony […]

REVIEW: Tribes (Silo)

June 11, 2012

Now how to express my experience? [by James Wenley] Tribes comes to Auckland’s stage with a babble of hype and expectation. Only playwright Nina Raine’s second play (after Rabbit which Silo performed in 2008 ), it’s something of an international critical darling after its debut at London’s Royal Court in 2010. Just last week it won New York Drama Desk’s […]