REVIEW: Sunset Road (Tawata Productions)

August 21, 2014

Easy ride along Sunset Road [by Sharu Delilkan] Only after watching the show did I discover that Sunset Road is Miria George‘s first play focussing on her Cook Islands whakapapa and gave me more insight into why the show was set in the 1970s, charting her grandparents’ story. A multitude of themes resonate within Sunset Road, the same way that […]

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: Punk Rock (Outfit Theatre Company)

March 29, 2012

Teen angst on overdrive [by James Wenley] Pity the British teenager. There’s something about the British school system that has seen it spawn more than its fair share of films, television and plays eviscerating the subject. Alan Bennett’s thoughtful The History Boys, which Punk Rock has been compared to, took a fairly noble approach to student’s studying their final exam. […]

REVIEW: The Motor Camp (Auckland Theatre Company)

February 12, 2012

Bringing back the cultural cringe [by James Wenley] Like many kiwis, I joined the yearly summer exodus from the cities, and went camping over New Years. The miserable rain-drenched ‘summer’ of 2012 had little to write home about of course, but it did provide me with one memorable experience: the family holiday train-wreck. Not my own, thank goodness. Evidently, the […]