REVIEW: Awatea (Auckland Theatre Company)

July 22, 2012

Awatea Shines Brightly [by Sharu Delilkan] You knew the writing was on the wall the minute you walked into the theatre. I’m of course referring to the beautifully chalked letters that ‘panoramically’ filled the backdrop of the entire stage. So dramatic, intriguing and utterly effective was this device that you could not help reading some of the letters while the […]

REVIEW: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Auckland Theatre Company)

May 7, 2012

Fancy a Puck? [by James Wenley] At the end of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, hobgoblin Puck famously excuses all that has gone before as a “weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream”. If so, it was a fantastic and crazy dream that the audience collectively dreamed in the theatre. While Puck undersells the thematic depths of […]

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 […]