Well, number one is, well, we all know that men aren’t the victims of modern society, right? When Elle and I sent out the email soliciting pitches for this edition of Salient we felt that we had to add—‘“Also, please don’t waste our time with any ‘men are now just as repressed as women were’ articles. Because, seriously, they’re not.” We had to put that there because that idea is becoming more popular. More and more people are pointing to the fact that all the men in advertising are idiots and claiming that as some victory by the fictional feminazis, while steadfastly ignoring that at least men get to keep their clothes on in the majority of advertising.

Yes, there are issues about men’s position in the real world and there is a men’s rights movement worth following. Sadly, it is not the ‘Men’s Rights’ movement. It’s feminism. Feminism seeks equality and fairness. Feminism acknowledges all imbalances in gender relationships. Feminism is seeking to allow anyone to walk down the street without being victimised; female, male or other. It just happens that women are the ones facing the more common and obvious brunt of that these days. ‘Men’s Rights’ purports to be about the same things but simply isn’t. Its attempts at readjusting the perceived power imbalance in the favour of women almost without exception fall into one of two camps; complaining about divorce law or, much more malevolently, an obsession with grotesquely exaggerating the occurrence of false rape claims, which does much to help support rape culture. We know that, that’s a bad thing, right? Because it really is.

We also know that when someone says ‘No’ it means you stop. Right? It makes me sad that we have to go over this but I have had too many discussions about rape and associated issues derailed by men starting to list exceptions as if there is any time ever where non-consensual sex is acceptable. There isn’t. There just isn’t. I don’t care if you think she is leading you on. I don’t care if you have ‘blue balls’. I don’t care if you think she’s just being coy and really actually does want to but just needs a little encouragement. No means no. You get verbal consent. Then you bone. That’s how it works.

Anyone who ever states otherwise is gravely misinformed about how things actually work, is angry that he doesn’t have anyone to suck his cock because he’s such a ‘nice guy’ and girls always go for ‘bad boys,’ or a misogynist. Usually all three. Usually without really meaning any harm either. But not knowing better is no excuse.

Look, I know it’s hard. You feel so gawky and awkward and all you can see is other people being happy. Girls holding hands and kissing lips that aren’t yours. What have you done wrong? You are nice and all that seems to happen is that you end up stuck in “the friend zone.” I’m tempted to say that “it gets better.” I won’t because that implies that there is some external force at work here. It will only get better when you stop wasting your time snarking about how women don’t like ‘nice guys’ like you and passing your casually hateful judgement against them, and actually start talking to them. Then things will get better. Don’t be a ‘nice guy,’ just be nice.

This seems harsh and direct. You know it all. You’ve heard it all before. But a lot of you seem to need to hear it again. Stop being douches guys. I’m fucking sick of it.
Glad we had this chat though,
Uther Dean

P.S. Dear all women,
Sorry about the looking at your boobs thing. We know you know. We know we aren’t good at hiding it. We wish we didn’t but we really can’t help it.
Soz,
All Men

About three months ago I realised that I was profoundly unhappy.

Not just a little sad. Not a bit iffy. Profoundly sad. And this was not just a bad day or moment. I had felt that way for as long as I could remember. I just had never really noticed it. Well, that’s not true. I had noticed but I had thought it was normal. I had thought that that’s what the stress of life and school and work felt like. Like this big knot of heavy black sitting on your chest making every morning into a bad blur. Kicking each nervous moment into a chasm of despair. Quiet panic in public places. This was, of course, depression. But that’s not the important part of this equation. That is that I didn’t notice something was wrong for so long, because I just thought that’s how things were.

The most nefarious part of all our little neuroses and sadnesses is not their actual effects, but the fact that by their very nature—they are inside our heads, and only we can see them or feel them—they separate us when, really, they should unite us. Because it seems like these feelings or moments seem like they are just happening to us, it is so easy to assume either that a) it’s normal and nothing to bother anyone else about, or b) it’s something that only happens to you. We need to realise that it is okay not to be okay, and that it is equally okay to ask for help or even just share. Life doesn’t have to be as hard as we make it.

You are never as alone as you feel you are—which is an incredibly easy thing to type or say or think, but it is a hard thing to actually believe or understand. When you read that sentence, something like “Except for me, I really am that alone” popped straight into your head. That is wrong. We are training ourselves as a society to find ourselves unworthy, to think that we are undeservedly stealing every moment of our lives. Worse yet, we are training ourselves to think that that is okay—that it is acceptable and normal to hate ourselves.

Which is insane. And we have to stop. And, you know how we stop doing it?

We just stop. It’s hard but we can. We do deserve to be happy. We are worthy. All of us.
…or maybe it’s just me,

Uther Dean
(40mg of Citalopram every morning)

photo by Michelle Ny

You will never see them. You will only know they are alive because their rent still comes through every week and their light is on. They will wear a track into the carpet from the front door to their room from all their secret ninja-like entrances and exits. Their shelf in the pantry will, at best, have a bag of old apples and some Raspberry Make-A-Shake that you bought them as an (awkward) ice breaker. If you manage to catch them and ask them how they are doing, they’ll simply bite their collar, mutter that they’re fine, and scuttle into their room like a frighted cockroach. They’ll be quiet. Too quiet. They will audibly sharpen knives in their room.

The Crazy

They will try to get pregnant by the randoms from the Big K that they bang so that you can’t kick them out. They will wake you up with their crying and insist that you watch 90210 with them or they’ll never sleep again. They’ll count their feijoas and then insist that you stole one when you are allergic—and they know that because they once put some in your pasta as a joke, sending you to hospital. They’ll diagnose themselves with Asperger’s; they’ll say that’s why they can’t talk to girls. They’ll listen to you with your girl- or boyfriend, masturbate, cry, then tell you that they do that. They’ll eat the exact same meal every day, and it will smell like death. You will come back from holiday to find sausage in your private shower.

The Rager

They’ll scream at 11-year-olds for singing Shania Twain. When they discover that they suck at video games they will throw their controller through your television. They will then blame you. For everything. They will talk about how we didn’t land on the moon and how mad it makes them that we’re being lied to. They will think you opened their mail so will steal yours. They will have screaming matches with their worn-down partners at 3am. The fire alarm will go off and they will smash it off the wall with the sword they keep in their room. They will always attend costume parties as Nazi war criminals.

The Douche

They will get changed in your room, secretly. They will stink everything up with Lynx and beer. They will cheat on their girlfriends with their girlfriends’ friends and be surprised when they confront him about it in public, calling them unreasonable. They will make people call them ‘Mr President’ during sex. They will try to flush condoms. They will, when questioned about how abhorrent their lifestyle is to all involved, simply shrug and say that is simply how they are made. The only communication they will ever have with you is crudely propositioning you late at night when they come home drunk and half-cocked. They will vomit on your laundry. They will pop collars unironically. They will have “a few friends round for quiet drinks”, noise control will be called three times, and the walls will shake.

The Hippie

They will call themselves Wiccan, when pressed they will not know what Wicca is. They will be vegetarians, when people are looking. They will give you three-hour lectures on recycling, but won’t do the dishes for weeks. They will not wear shoes when they have Athlete’s Foot and are awaiting the appropriate herbs from home in the post to treat it. Their response to any reasonable request for assistance or help will be to get high. They will not use deodorant, they will borrow your clothes. They will think that being a volunteer DJ on student radio is a full-time job. Their pet rats will chew through the walls and power cables.

The Cleaner

Everything will smell of bleach. Every unwashed dish will accrue a passive-aggressive note. Your stuff will be thrown out if it is “in the way”. There will be a cleaning roster. It will be more complicated than any of your current course work. You will not follow it. They will call you a “fucking traitor” for this. They will take Sunday morning vacuuming more seriously than any other event ever to occur to humanity. They will do the flat shopping and return with more Spray n’ Wipe than things consumable to humans. They will publicly berate their lovers for not flossing enough before sex.

Well, a part of the reasoning was framed by our obsessive need for symmetry—following a futuristic digitech Online issue with a cheap, tabloid, newsprint inkity-split Offline issue seemed like too good an idea to not follow through—but the biggest part is couched in our interest in Salient’s future and, by way of that, its past.

Salient’s positioning of itself as more of a magazine than a newspaper is a relatively new move in its life choreography as a publication. It was only in the lateish ‘80s that magazine style features started appearing in these pages. Before that Salient was almost exclusively news-based (dotted with very occasional opinion pieces and comedy gossip items) in its four or eight pages.

As we face an uncertain future both in how journalism in general operates and distributes itself (especially with the recent death of the NZPA, about which there is more on pg. 9) and how Salient specifically is going to be in the future with the great cloak of VSM descending, we need to look at ourselves and really think about how Salient will be in the future. Salient is, in its current-form, not expensive. But, neither is it cheap by any means.

We simply do not know what next year’s editor or editors will be faced with when they sit down to negotiate next year’s budget. Maybe it will be relatively fair sailing or maybe they will be forced to half running costs of Salient. Last week and this week’s issues are here to show ourselves, future Salienteers and you, our audience, what Salient might be like in the future. Or it might not. It might look like it normally does. But on better paper. Or worse paper.

While financial considerations are always pressing on our minds and our way of working, want you want as readers is also incredibly important to us. Tell us what you want Salient to look like in the future. Send us an email or drop in the office for a chat. This is your magazine. It should be in a form you are happy with. So, let us know!

Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then we’ll begin,

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) invented a bunch of interesting and useful stuff (and was good friends with Mark Twain). Most notably he played a large part in the development of the alternating current system of delivering electricity, which thrust him into a war with Thomas Edison, inventor of the competing direct current. This war ended with the murder of an elephant, which was how scientists settled disagreements back in the 1880s. Tesla invented the Tesla coil, which basically boils down to being a sphere that generates large terrifying arcs of electricity. He carefully measured the size and weight of every meal he consumed, even fastidiously counting how many times he chewed each mouthful. He had an incredibly addictive or completest personality: he avoided reading books for pleasure because he would then have to read every other book by that author immediately. He avoided the company of women, fearing he would become addicted to one, which would detract from his science. He also tried to make a death ray and has been played by David Bowie in a film.

Harry Harlow (1905-1981) was an American psychologist who spent a lot of his career researching ideas of love, intimacy and familial connection. Which seems all well and good until you discover that almost all of his experiments seemed to revolve around torturing rhesus monkeys until they had total mental collapses. It started with his experiments in maternal care. He removed baby monkeys from their mothers and had them choose between a mother surrogate made of wire and one made of fabric. Then he’d frighten them, abandon them, or take them to unknown places. When they had their cloth mothers with them, they would cling to them. When they didn’t, they would run “from object to object, apparently searching for the cloth mother, as they cried and screamed”. Which sounds pretty harrowing, but not nearly as bad as what Harlow called his ‘Pit of Despair,’ a total isolation chamber allowing them to be fed without any contact with other living beings or natural light. There, he’d place baby monkeys for up to two years to enable him to study the effects of isolation on people. That it drove them totally insane goes without saying; Harlow came to the conclusion that, paraphrased, worked out to “Well, maybs people need to be touched by other things to not totally lose their shit”. Other devices used by Harlow included the ‘Rape Rack’ and Iron Maidens.

José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado (1915), a professor of physiology at Yale University, has been experimenting for years with something that can only be described as Remote Control Mind Control. A lot of his work focused on his ‘stimoceiver’, a radio device that can, due to implanted electrodes in the subject’s heads, control their emotions and behavior. He has stopped bulls mid-charge with this as well as training a chimpanzee to associate pain with cognitive thought and, thusly, think as little as possible. And, yes, he has been experimenting on humans too. He has made people experience “pleasant sensations, elation, deep, thoughtful concentration, odd feelings, super relaxation, colored visions, and other responses”, which makes it seem rather pleasant. But, actually, all those emotions are coming from fucking electrodes in your fucking skull. He has been quoted as saying that “brain transmitters can remain in a person’s head for life”. So, uh, how do we know they’re not in there now? A conspiracy theory based on Delgado’s research must surely be forthcoming.

Giovanni Aldini (1762-1834) was a professor of physics, but physics was not his true love. His real passion was for electrocuting dead things. He travelled Europe with what amounted to a freak show, ostensibly in the name of science. For the public’s edification, he would hang up human and animal corpses and galvanise them—that is to say, he ran shitloads of electricity through them, making them twitch, distort, and smoke. In 1803, he made a presentation to the Royal College of Surgeons in London where he puppeteered the corpse of a recently hanged criminal with two massive conducting rods.

Vladimir Demikhov (1916-1998). Basically, anything that needs to be said about this man’s work is expressed in the following excerpt from The Daily Mail, a reporter from which attended a presentation by Demikov: “Blinking unhappily in the daylight as Demikhov paraded it on its lead, this unfortunate beast had been created by grafting the head and upper body of a small puppy on the head and body of a fully-grown mastiff, to form one grotesque creature with two heads. The visitors watched in horror and fascination as both of the beast’s mouths lapped greedily at a bowl of milk proffered by Demikhov’s assistants.”

Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov (1870-1932) was a Soviet biologist and really, really wanted to make a human-ape hybrid super soldier. He first floated the idea in 1910 but only found support to actually explore the idea in 1924. He started by artificially inseminating female chimpanzees with human sperm—which every source on these experiments emphatically states was neither his nor his son’s. The female chimps, however, did not become pregnant. He then moved on to attempting his hybridisation the other way round with ape sperm being placed in human females. Only a lack of post-pubescent male apes stopped this becoming a reality before a general political shakeup in 1930 put an end to his disturbing madness. He was arrested soon after.

Joe Davis (1953) is a research affiliate at MIT in biology. If ever there was a man who could have the title ‘Mad Art Science Bastard’ applied to him, it’s this guy. He has invented the Audio Microscope, which allows you to hear livings cells. He has tested to see how E. Coli responds to Jazz. He has put a map of the Milky Way into the ear of a mouse. He recorded the vaginal contractions of ballet dancers and transmitted them into space. But, best of all, he uses his homemade steel peg leg to open bottles of beer.

Science rather cynically tells us that everything we do is building towards mating. We are little flesh computers and our primary programming is to manufacture other little meat machines. Everything we do circles back to the popping of sprogs—in purely physical and biological terms, at the least.

But what does that mean for love? Is it just a chemical fault in the brain? Is just some psycho-spasm to make us stick together long enough for our kiddie-winks to not die?

It certainly seems that way.

Anthropologists generally break the love rollercoaster into three stages. First, there is lust, an initial explosion of testosterone and estrogen through your brain tubes. It lasts only a few weeks—a couple of months at the most. This exposes people to others and promotes mating.

If feelings of lust are found to be reciprocated, stage two then begins: sexual attraction. This floods the brain with pheromones, dopamine and serotonin, which basically act like amphetamines. These also create in the brain a state of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It is oddly reassuring that people do actually go mad with love. This lasts for between several months and three-odd years. This is to precipitate the insemination of the woman (if you know what I mean!).

Then comes stage three: attachment. This step, neurologically, is incredibly similar to how a parent imprints on their child. This profound sense of dependency does however decay over time if it isn’t periodically renewed.

Yay.

And so, we can conclude that love is not a state. It is a series of actions. The delightfully-named psychologist and author of The Art of Loving Eric Fromm says that love starts out as an involuntary feeling, but quickly becomes a conscious commitment. The series of loving actions that we perform under the conscious pretense of love is not some charade. That is love. The seemly false embodiment of an emotion in fact generates that emotion within the brain. Just as smiling makes you feel happy (try it—it works), acting like you’re in love with someone will often actually make you fall in love with them. There is no platonic ideal of love only the shadow on the walls of our heart. The fact and the fiction of the feeling are the same.

Which is nice to know.

The graduation season at Toi Whakaari is always something to look forward to. The graduating third year acting students perform in one or two shows in Te Whaea’s main spaces half as a fair well to the school that has ruled their lives for the previous three years and half as a demonstration of their skills. This year’s plays – The Pohutukawa Tree by Bruce Mason and Wild Cabbage by James Beaumont – share little in common between a) New Zealand theatre works and b) being in this season. They both have their strengths and they both have their weaknesses but they are both more than worth your time.

The Pohutukawa Tree will never be far from the top of any list of the top New Zealand plays. Even though it has aged rather noticeably and not all that well, it is still a very good text. Telling the story of the last Maori family in Te Paranga and the matriarch Aroha’s fight to keep her land and her family stable. Rachel House’s direction shows a clear reverence for the text and her production is at its best when it is simply playing the words out on the stage. The performances are, on the whole, strong but there at some points seems to be a reticence to directly engage with some of the deeper emotions in the script making a lot of the performances seem rather superficial. Also there is real problem with how the playing space is defined. Scenes set supposedly in the same room show different lay outs and the non-naturalistic entrances and exits work well in theory but only distract in practice. The images that House builds are interesting and aesthetically brilliant but don’t quite sit within the work that is being expressed. Also, the interval is in the wrong place and with Te Whaea’s butthating seats this kind of thing really should be considered. But all these are just niggles and House and her cast do justice (if on slightly qualified terms) to a Kiwi classic.

Wild Cabbage is a very hard play to describe. It’s kinda a vaudeville about family in the fifties but its just as much a drama about the rejected and disenfranchised. It is a riotous comedy in the same breath as being dank and dense voyage through the city at night. Director Leo Gene Peters has taken a rather troubled script, which by turns doesn’t seem to know what it wants to say and hysterically moralising the next, and polished and carved it into a delightful gem. The cast are universally excellent and had I a time machine I would go back and give Wild Cabbage the award for best surprise in the Salient theatre awards. not for a plot twist or for a shock but for the delightful transformation that the play, space and performances undergo in the second half. A massive and unqualified success.

In short – they’re both good but if you’re only gonna see one see Wild Cabbage.

==

The Pohutukawa Tree
at Toi Whakaari, 20 – 30 Oct, 6.30pm

Wild Cabbage
at Toi Whakaari, 21 – 30 Oct, 7pm

Carl Nixon’s new play The Birthday Boy falls very much into that classic Kiwi theatre tradition of making the middle-class laugh at themselves and then getting a bit heavy-handed and anvilicious with the navel-gazing and ‘Life is hard, eh?’ at the end. It knows what it is and it knows what it is doing and it does it well.

It is a play about the friendship between two married couples – David (Peter Hambleton) & Kathy (Geraldine Brophy) and Stuart (Phil Vaughan) & Elizabeth (Jude Gibson). When David and Kathy reveal that they’e having a child a rift develops between the two couples and it is the charting of that rift and the cracks that appear in the couples’ own relationships over a couple of decades that provides the meat of the drama.

The long term time frame of the play plays some interesting structural games which allows for good exploration of the long term effects of people’s actions. But there is also a lot of really rather lazy ‘satire’ about what the future is like which is the only part of the comedy that fails and could really afford to be dropped. When the humour is much more rooted in the characters and their story it is hilarious. This is a play with which you can properly laugh. Director Jane Waddell is a master of getting great comic performances and this cast of five (with Donna Akersten as David’s mother) all do outstanding comic and dramatic work throughout the piece.

It is only towards the end that it becomes slightly unfocused as a work. It seems unsure how to transition between tones and stories towards the end. Also, the final scene strikes one as much more as an unnaturally contrived dialouge following a unforgivably massive coincidence than a natural conclusion to the story. But this is no major issue and you should still go and see The Birthday Boy.

==

The Birthday Boy
At Circa theatre, 9 Oct – 6 Nov

A naked man wakes up in a tube. He is mute and child-like. Over the forty or so minutes of Genepool he explores his new found surroundings. This is a clone and maybe the last person alive in this post-apocalyptic wasteland. He struggles to understand his surroundings just as much as he struggles to walk just as much as the audience struggles to connect to the work.

Created by a company rather deliciously named Hoi Polloi, Genepool is a play of almost-but-not-quites. It is almost but not quite without dialogue – relying as it rather annoyingly does on that old easy exposition dump of the radio montage and answerphone. It is almost but not quite a solo show – with a set as central and meticulously integrated into the work it is hard to separate setting and performer. It is almost but not quite ‘avant garde’ – a term that the makers have assigned the work in press for the show – because, well, maybe I’m just getting a little jaded but it takes a little more than non-existent costume budget and no speaking to make something ‘avant garde’.

Genepool contains a rather traditional, if a little hard to get to and a lot hard to care about, narrative. It is a STAB show in name, funding and season but only almost but not quite in content. STAB, in case you didn’t know, is a yearly programme where Creative New Zealand gives BATS theatre $80,000 to fund two or more shows. STAB is experimentation on a big budget. It is allowing people to activate and actuate ideas that wouldn’t work on smaller budgets. I am not sure that Genepool really does that. A lot of their budget clearly was spent on the set, and what a set it is, designed and build by WETA workshop, it is a motherhood metaphor made real. A steam punk uterus complete with birth canal through which the clone emerges. It dominates BATS’ space, commanding much attention and much praise – both of which are more than due. But having an expensive set is, in my opinion, not enough to be a STAB work.

Maybe the makers of Genepool would disagree with me, but it strikes me that there is something awfully well… vanilla about this show. It would have been a different show without the set but it would still have been a show. This is not helped by how thrown together the action that takes place on the set feels.

Francis Mountjoy is the clone and as the sole performer he does a perfectly fine job. He is never boring to watch but there is nothing really ever that profoundly gripping in his performance. The sheer physical endurance of his performance should be highly praised however. The very fact that he gets what must be a physically exhausting forty minutes at all is an achievement in itself.

The biggest problem with the content of Genepool (that is everything that is not the brilliant design) is that it feels under cooked. It feels like a very interesting beginning of something. The slightly too long opening scene of an otherwise interesting play. Also, there just isn’t enough ideas or plot to sustain the already short running time. It feels like something thrown together at the last minute to complement their brilliant design. While I am sure that isn’t true, it doesn’t stop that it feels like that.

The makers of Genepool speak in the programme about how they already have plans on expanding and extending the work. The question that the work poses is – why didn’t you do that the first time round? Because if they’d spent a little more time of the show rather than the set (one cannot help but conclude that this work would operate much better as an installation) it would rise above being almost but not quite good enough to recommend.

===

Genepool
at BATS theatre, 16 Oct – 6 Nov (No Sun/Mon), 8pm.

Presented in fragments—some of them related, some of them not—and exploring issues of mortality and the inherent questions of existence and dreaming, Innocence should have been one of my favourite plays of the year. But it’s not.

Sebastian Sommer, who directed this as part of his MTA in Directing, has an eye for incredibly striking images. One that is shared by his designers. Innocence is a very beautiful thing to look at. As an aesthetic acheivement it is great. It’s just a pity that I spent so much of the two hours (without interval—in terrible seats) thinking about why the soundscape was giving me a headache.

Loher is attempting something quite grand in this script, an emotional cross-section of the world, and while it does fall somewhat short of being as effective as it needs and wants to be, the real failing of this production is the performances. Many of them feel unrehearsed and undirected, emotional dialogue is pitched
wrong and all moments of connection are lost.

Sommer is clearly a talented director. This is not the show to demonstrate that.

Innocence
Wri. Dea Loher
Dir. Sebastian Sommer
At Toi Whakaari

That’s right! Theatre! Awards! Theawards!

Best Use of Giant Cardboard Cityscape—The Arrival

Best Use of Aaron Cortesi in a Wig—Mark Twain and Me in Maoriland

Best Disabled Naked Person—Sophie Hambleton in KatyDid

Best Echo—Darlene Mohekey in Shipwrecked!

Best Adaptation of a F. Scott Fitzgerald Novel—The Great Gatsby

Best Play That Turned Out A Lot Better than You Could Reasonably Assume from Its Premise and Advertising—My First Time

Best Animal—the Horses in Equus

Worst Stage Combat in an Otherwise Okay Play—Mauritius

Best Play Directed By The Writer Of The Salient Theatre Pages—DOORS. WALLS. AND ALSO SILENCE.

Best Play About David Bain—the middle act of The December Brother

Worst Play About David Bain—the rest of The December Brother

Worst Kept Secret—Martyn Wood as new Programme manager at BATS

Best Comedic Mispronunciations—Tea for Toot

Best Use of Balloons—Resolve

Best Yelling Through a Door—Dan Slevin in The Immortal

Best Performance by Andrew Foster in Realtime—Ninety

Best American Accents By Young People—Vernon God Little

Best Rapping by a White Person—Ralph McCubbin Howell in both Who’s Neat? You! and KatyDid

Best Sex with the Corpse of a Hari Krishna—Mitch Tawhi Thomas in Jangle

Best Freaky Child Puppets—Aphelion

Best Emoting—Guy Langford in Wannabe

Most Boring Play—Mary Stuart

Best Play with Palindromic Title—Dog Sees God

Best Play That Should Have Been in Circa Two Rather than BATS—Father Familiar

The “Best International Play” Award for the Best Play from Overseas—TEOREMAT

Best Ralph Upton—Ralph Upton in Elimination Rounds

Second Best Play of the Year—The Guru of Chai

Best Play of the Year—Mark Twain and Me in Maoriland

Worst Play of the Year if Not Ever—Pink Lighter

This year’s production from the Asian Theatre Practice Paper in the Theatre Department is, as is to be expected, totally insane. But good insane. Fun insane. Bonkers, if you will. Adapted from a novel—and it shows with its hanging plots and sometimes leaden plotting—it tells the story of how the production of a play in Soviet-era Russia about Judas is disrupted by the appearance of a man who may or may not be the devil.

The design is outstanding (though the lights seem very unfinished), especially the costumes, and it is hard
not to admire the sheer vim with which the cast throw themselves into the work. The Master and Margarita has a great attitude and style which are really only let down by the whole being twenty minutes too long and how it tends to lose focus towards the end. A treat.

The Master and Margarita
Wri. Bulgakov
Dir. Megan Evans
At 77 Fairlie Tce

A You will not wear hats at all next year. You will develop an allergy to covering your scalp. This will play havoc with your ongoing conversion to Sikhism.

B You need to start a vegetable garden next year. The apocalypse is coming soon and you’ll need some noms.

C You need to stop cracking your knuckles next year. Otherwise you will do it one time too many and snap off your fingers like frozen matchsticks.

D You need to learn to speak to animals. No human will want to speak to you after what you get up to on New Year’s Eve.

E You will spend a lot of next year licking windows clean. Your tongue will quickly become sodden with dust and regret.

F 2011 will be a year of transition for you. Due to a failed science experiment you will make the transition from man to capybara.

G Next year, you will begin to learn that you can actually appreciate things unironically. You will drop the shroud of sneers that hangs over your head like a dying carpet ghost. You don’t just have to like things because they’re shit, y’know?

H Next year, you will learn that you deserve all that comes your way. You are not as unworthy as you think you are.

I You will hug more people next year. This, sadly, will lead to profound dependency issues and you will die alone, having forced everyone who ever cared about you away.

J Next year is a time of real change for you. It is the second shift in your life. You’ve been so used to having your future mapped out for you and that there is now some doubt frightens you. This is good. Uncertainty is potential and you have more than enough of that. Now you just need to do something.

K Text back faster.

L Next year will all be about colliding worlds. Former separated spheres of your existence will collide. Like worlds. Like in When Worlds Collide.

M Next year, you will learn to stand up for yourself. Your thoughts are powerful. Like Listerine. Let them wash out the world with your braveness.

N All your sweat will turn into golden showers of excellence next year. Yellow sprays of achievement will drown your doubts.

O You develop a gambling addiction over the course of next year. It will start with the odd flutter but will soon snowball into a fully-fledged dragon of an addiction. You’ll sell your face for just one more jab at the gee-gees.

P Next year, the closure of Youtube will drastically increase your productivity.

Q You will go to New York next year where fewer people will persecute you.

R Next year? It’s gonna be like this year. Just like this year.

S Once you stop equating respect with control, next year will get a lot better.

T Enjoy summer next year because everything after that is going to be mildly disappointing. Like a not-fully-boiled kettle.

U No more horoscopes.

V Next year you will start dressing like a man more often.

W You will meet a tall dark stranger. They’ll be pretty nice. You’ll be friends but it’ll never really move beyond that, poisoning the next few years of your life with a desperate ennui, wishing for what could have been.

X Read Proust.

Y You are going to die. Not next year. Just at some point.

Z You need to mow the lawn.

Presented in their now-default style of stripped-back realism, a wide empty performance space fringed by chairs on which the performers sit when they’re not performing, Long Cloud Youth Theatre’s production of Peter Shaffer’s seminal work of implied horse shagging Equus is a success, but on rather interesting terms.

As always, the performances, especially those of the three performers playing the horses, are stellar. Long Cloud produces actors of a professional standard and, on the whole, most of these performances would not look unworthy on larger, more reputable stages than WPAC’s cavernous performance venue. Willem Wassenaar’s direction is, as a matter of course, amazing.

There is an interesting conflict demonstrated in Equus about Long Cloud’s dual roles as a teaching facility and as a performing company. The leads in Equus are played by the same actors who played the leading roles in many of their previous plays; I could not help but watch the supporting players and wish that, in the interests of the improvement of their skills, they’d get a bash at the showier roles.

Equus
Wri. Peter Shaffer
Dir. Willem Wassenaar
At WPAC

The Seagull is Chekhov’s masterpiece and very much a defining text in all of theatre. I have seen at least three professional productions before this one by Long Cloud and none of them hold a candle to this brilliant production. While some of the performances may be on the shaky side of okay, the sheer trust of the text and unparalleled pleasure/pressure in the expression of emotion is breathtaking. This production is not just a triumph on the terms of youth theatre but of all theatre. Special mention must be given to Ingrid Saker whose performance of Nina is a recursive circle of genius and one of my favourite performances of the year. In a week where I saw six plays basically back-to-back, this easily stood out as the highlight. Brilliant.

The Seagull
Wri. Anton Chekhov (Adapted by Tom
Stoppard)
Dir. Willem Wassenaar
at WPAC

The Misanthrope is a really hard play to stage. As a text it reads as effortlessly, if somewhat contrivedly, funny. Written in rhyme and French in the 17th century, it tells the story of the one man in a world full of flatterers and deceivers who is willing to speak his mind. Unfortunatey he lacks the tact to realise that you don’t have to speak your mind all the time. Also, he’s in love with a girl who’s a total bitch. Hilarity ensues.

It is harder than it sounds to put on. Not that you’d know that from Long Cloud’s production which takes Moliere’s unhurried float of a pace and turns into a vibrant bullrush of a play. This show surges ahead like a tiger on a treadmill. The heighed performances and cartoonish costumes dazzle and draw you in equal measure.

However, one could not help but feel that this production was still a mite too long at two hours, and that a few cuts could have brought it to an all the more appropriate 90 or 100 minutes or so.

The Misanthrope
Wri. Moliere
Dir. Willem Wassenaar
At WPAC

SCRAMBLED is the second of two complications of six ten minute long scenes directed by this year’s THEA 304—Directing students. The design, most specifically the lights, are done by the THEA 220—Scenography students.

Attempts On Her Life

wri. Martin Crimp
dir. George Hirst
Martin Crimp’s work, with its rejection of a lot of modern theatrical form, is a challenge for even the most seasoned of directors and there is a sense here that Hirst running before he can walk. While there are some bold strokes made in this production, it lacks the coherence that the text so desperately demands. It doesn’t help that the cast seems to be having trouble committing to the work, either as a gesture or as a narrative.

Variations On The Death of Trotsky

wri. David Ives
dir. Emerald Naulder
Storming along with belly laughs and great gusto, Naulder has crafted a tight ten-minute piece. The performances may have been somewhat one note, but that was more than made up for by the sheer energy which the piece exuded. Naulder could refine her blocking—characters seem to dawdle aimlessly and audience members on either side of the thrust stage saw less than they should.

Fugue

wri. Laura Miller
dir. Samantha McLean
It is hard to judge McLean’s directorial nous based on this piece due to her bad choice of text. Fugue is at best mawkish, at worse offensive, in its exploration of the death of young children. The amateurish set also heavily distracts. McLean clearly has a good sense of the dramatic and creates some effective images; it’s just a pity she wasted them on such a poor choice of script.

HamletMachine

wri. Heiner Müller
dir. Stella Reid
Some would argue that HamletMachine is the definitive post-modern text. It is certainly quite hard to wrestle with textually, swimming as it does through a viscous syrup of references—both intellectual and otherwise—with no real motion towards any idea of plot or even character. That Stella Reid’s production seems so effortless, so seamless and yet still just as semiotically dense as the text from which it arises stands as only one of its many victories. A highlight.

Methusalem

wri. Yvan Goll
dir. Ian Harris
A brilliant central performance by Blair Everson is the standout in this piece. Increasingly obtuse and without respite, one cannot help but feel lost in the unfocused tangle of this work. There seems to be a narrative but Harris seems unconcerned with expressing it. There are many flashes of brilliance but one often feels they arise not from Harris working with the text but from a more arbitrary space. Perhaps a more literal or at least more lucid text would have served Harris better?

Let Us Go Out Into The Starry Night

wri. John Patrick Shanley
dir. Rachelle Fons
There is a really engaging exuberance and joy to Fons’ work. It bowls along like a jelly brick down a water slide made of smiles. She seems, however, to focus so heavily on the big picture, the wider scream of the work, that many nuances are lost and the piece as a whole tends to get a bit overly literal. For a piece about the connection between two people, the audience never really gets to experience or buy into it.

SCRAMBLED at Studio 77, 77 Fairlie Tce at 7pm on the 23rd and 25th of September 2010

• Never shower when you can bathe.
• Never bathe when you can sauna.
• Never sauna when you can have nubile slaves paint your body with melted butter.
• You should always have at least three bunches of grapes within reach.
• Your ultimate goal should be never to support your own weight either literally or metaphorically.
• The line between clothes for bed and clothes for the real world should rapidly blur.
• Replace all water with champagne. Especially in things like hot water bottles or washing machines.
• Buy at least one new nude sculpture a day. They should preferably all be larger than life-size.
• Your house needs to contain at least three stone ampitheatres for, like, erotica shows.
• You need at least one advisor who drinks vodka as ‘twere it water and speaks in iambic pentameter.
• Edible clothes.
• Edible everything.
• Travel everywhere on your own miniature train system. The train drivers should be trained mice.
• Don’t wash anything like dishes or clothes. Once soiled, throw them away and buy new ones.
• Velvet everything. Your soap should be velvet. Your hair should be velvet.
• Don’t do anything. Ever. Nothing productive. Nothing even helpful. Just exist. That is enough. People get so caught up in the idea that they have to actually do something with their lives. This is, at best, a fallacy. There is no meaning in life. You are under no obligation to do anything except breathe.
• Refer to everything in terms of how ‘glorious’ you find it to be.

The Guru of Chai is the latest work from Indian Ink Theatre Company, whose first show, Krishnan’s Diary, was a meteoric success both creatively and in terms of ticket sales. This popularity, paired with a fierce and funny intelligence, runs through all of Indian Ink’s work. After their first few shows, in which Jacob Rajan was the sole cast member, they began to experiment with larger casts. The Guru of Chai is a return to the Rajan-led solo style of their earlier work. This time, however, character changes are not done by the deft switching of masks but through the pure power of Rajan’s talent. And powerful it is.

Like all solo shows, Guru requires more than just skill from its performer. It requires charm and an inherent watchability that is more elusive than it seems—many otherwise incredibly skilled performers lack it. Not Rajan. The Guru of Chai is, above all else, a profoundly entertaining performance by a profoundly talented performer.

The concept of the work is that Hilary Beaton, the head of Downstage, thinks that her audiences have gotten lax and lazy, fat and sedentary, spending more time with technology than each other. To combat this, she has called in The Guru of Chai to heal our lives with a tale from his. While this frame and the story it contains of lost love, parrots and of course, tea, don’t really match up, and there are some quite irksome holes in the plot, you don’t really notice. You are often far too busy laughing to notice.

That is not to paint The Guru of Chai as an empty comedy. Indian Ink believe in the ‘Serious Laugh’; the serious masked in the humorous. It works.

An interesting fact that stands in this work is the fact that it was designed to play in much smaller spaces than the epic Hannah Playhouse that Downstage sits in. It was made to be performed in living rooms or community halls and one cannot help but feel that it would be better experienced in those more intimate and stripped-down environments. While John Verryt’s set (like his costumes) is beautiful and well-executed, it isn’t needed.

David Ward composed the superb score and performs it live.

The Guru of Chai is a sublime piece of theatre, something with which any audience member can connect.

The Guru of Chai
wri. Justin Lewis and Jacob Rajan
dir. Justin Lewis
perf. Jacob Rajan
mus. David Ward
At Downstage, until 2 October
www.downstage.co.nz

Resolve is the second work by Odd Socks productions. Their first work was the ham-handed yet well-intentioned Words Apart. Odd Socks’ self-generated remit is to make work that appeals to deaf as well as hearing audiences. Resolve is a very big and surprisingly experimental step towards the creation of a theatre that can communicate with both the deaf and the hearing. With your programme you are given a balloon and some ear plugs. The ear plugs are because the sound is turned up loud so that you can feel the vibrations of the sound through the balloons. It’s really trippy and extremely awesome.

As an exercise in form, Resolve is a success. Thomas Press and Murray Hickman’s soundscape and Rachel Marlow’s lights work incredibly well together to create an interesting and evolving pallette of theatricality. The design elements of Resolve (with the exception of the slapdash set) are the true stars, giving tour-de-force performances, and they are worth the price of entry alone.

This is lucky because the play itself is sadly not up to much. It is only through reading director Nicola Clements’ note in the programme that I understood that the seemingly random vignettes that shapelessly fill the hour running time bore any connection—whether thematic or plot-based—to each other. Resolve feels like a 20 cent notebook half-filled with sketches and half-formed ideas. There’s some good stuff in here. It’s just a long way from being ready for public consumption. Scenes frequently repeat themselves and each other without development or variation; I often found myself wishing that the tableaux and sequences in Resolve were as interesting and dynamic as Clements clearly thinks they are. As much as Resolve triumphs as an exercise in form and design, it fails in its storytelling and, sadly, communication.

Resolve
dir. Nicola Clements
perf. Lorena Hayward, Melissa Sutton, Ben Webb, Jared Flitcroft, Saran Goldie-Anderson and Nadia Austin
At BATS, 6.30pm, until the 2nd October
book@bats.co.nz | (04) 802 4175

FRIED is the first of two complications of six ten minute long scenes directed by this years THEA 304 – Directing students. The design and lighting is done by the THEA 220—Scenography students.

The Chocolate Affair
wri. Stephanie Walker
dir. Daniel Emms
The Chocolate Affair is hamstrung by its rather weak and boring script. Beverly has stolen her daughter’s Halloween candy and then it starts talking to her. It goes nowhere quickly and manages to feel overlong at only ten minutes. Emms clearly has a talent for getting good comic performances out of his actors—though his tendency to over-milk jokes really begins to wear after a while. While a very strong attempt is made at the more serious passages of the work, ultimately a lack of build distracts from the attempted emotional gravity.

One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays
wri. Kenneth Koch
dir. Theo Taylor
Taylor has complied five or so entries from One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays into a mosaic of physical theatre. He has clearly gotten the cast—Owen Baxendale, Joel Baxendale, Rachel Baker and Clare Marcie Wilson—to really attach themselves to the work and they operate incredibly well as an ensemble. Taylor has a very good eye for effective stage imagery, though it did occasionally lack a cohesive sense of flow.

The Cripple of Inishmaan
wri. Martin McDonagh
dir. Sophie Sargent
That Martin McDonagh writes very specifically and directly for the Irish accent could easily have crippled (hiyoooooooooo) this scene due to student actors rarely having a non-parodic Irish accent in their tea chest of tricks. While the accents are hardly perfect, they surprisingly are good enough to not distract from some winning performances. Sargent shows a real talent for the basic shaping of the theatre—of these six pieces this sustains itself the best with a nice, seemingly natural build and release.

Angels in America
wri. Tony Kushner
dir. Jack O’Donnell
Angels in America is a big deal. A big skyscraper of a play casting a long homoerotic shadow over all really modern theatre. Definitive visions of it abound left and right like cats in a cat factory. The very fact that O’Donnell doesn’t (metaphorically) choke to death on what he has bitten off can be counted as a success. While the design elements—an inexplicable whiteboard dominating the stage—don’t necessarily match the text, O’Donnell clearly has a flair for stage imagery and it is simply letting them evolve naturally out of the text that he needs to work on.

Saving Grace
wri. Duncan Sarkies
dir. Alex Grady
This quirky and eerily local play about Gerald, a man who is pretty sure he’s actually Jesus, is played with good humour and interesting tension by Grady and his actors. The set is largely pointless but there are some great lighting gags. However, you can’t help but feel that there are better extracts from this text to perform. As strong as some of Grady’s work clearly is, this work doesn’t complete itself or have a definitive shape, making it feel somewhat unsatisfying.

Fando and Lis
wri. Fernando Arrabal
dir. Lisa Missen
Fando and Lis is sure to divide people. I, personally, had a really good time. Missen pitching the absurdism of this tale of four people very slowly on their way to nowhere in exactly the right place. While the cast lacked a little energy, I found lots to enjoy. However, people I attended with hated it. Ah well. Can’t please everyone.

FRIED
dir. Daniel Emms, Theo Taylor, Sophie Sargent, Jack O’Donnell, Alex Gardy and Lisa Missen
at Studio 77, 77 Fairlie Tce at 7pm on the 22nd and 24th of September 2010

Monday
Umbrella broken
New rain cover needed soon
Summer is a lie

Tuesday
Dish cloth mould grows fast
Know that scrubbing takes less time
Green fuzz overwhelms

Wednesday
Oh Crossword cancer
Pencil chew = lead poisoning
Love your tongue now please

Thursday
More shaving your face
Too much mo! Too much beard-beard!
Bad stubble rubble

Friday
Hot drinks help your nose
But boozing will kill your soul
We can’t have nice things

Saturday
Take less internet
Facebook is not your real space
Disco for a life

Sunday
Stop pirating stuff
Artists suffer… or something
Money equals praise

Down at Victoria University’s theatre warren, 77 Fairlie Terrace, twelve humble third-years are facing armageddon: Theatrical Armageddon that is. They are the students of THEA 304—Directing. Over the past trimester they have run headlong through a crazed crash-course of theatre-based fascism. This week, the delicious fruits of their labour are presented on a stage-y platter for your hungry heads. Salient theatre magistrate Uther Dean sat down with two of these brave little directorial mongrels, Stella Reid and Rachelle Fons, and talked about how they are still alive, and why we should see their shows and stuff. Here we grant you exclusive access to some excerpts from that conversation.

UD: Why do theatre? You’ve just spent three years of your life studying theatre. Why?

SR: That’s a good question.

UD: So what is your thing?

SR: What is our thing?

UD: You know? Describe your thing. Like I know nothing.

SR: Well..?

UD: Well, I know what theatre is, but… What is your thing?

SR: In your third year you can apply for the directing paper where you look at a lot of things, but work towards a production at the end of the year…which is directing a ten minute long scene or excerpt or short play, based on what we’ve learnt about directing styles and stuff like that.”

UD: So what is directing?

SR: and RF: [laughter]

SR: Wow. That’s a really interesting question.

[Pause]

SR: I think directing is being a really good judge of character. There’s this fantastic Peter Brook quote—“If you want someone to stand on a chair, tell them the floor is on fire”.

RF: I had scrambled eggs for breakfast this morning.

SR: I had poached.

RF: We put mine last because we didn’t want people walking home and shooting themselves because they were so depressed. And I wanted to go last because I wanted to make a mess and not have to clean it up in two minutes.

SR: ‘People will hate it.’

UD: Well, this is an incredibly diverse set of plays…

RF: All of the plays this year are so different. That’s one of the most exciting things about our directing class. We all chose such different plays.

SR: I’ve created something that I really like and I’m not sure how other people will react to. But, as long as I like it…

[Second-year theatre students enter the Green Room while the interview is occuring.]

SYTS: “Oh, look it’s the fucking directing students.”

The THEA 304 Directing Season is split into two groups of six shows. One is called FRIED the other is called SCRAMBLED. FRIED is on the 22nd and 24th of September. SCRAMBLED is on the 23rd and 25th. They are both in the studio at 77 Fairlie Tce at 7pm. Tickets are $15/$8. Book by emailing
theatre@vuw.ac.nz or by ringing (04) 463 5359. Awes? Awes.

Sam (Mel Dodge) visits her dementing father Roy (John Bach) every Christmas at the Old Folks’ Home in which he is slowly rotting. Roy’s memory is not what it once was and as Sam reminds him of the facts of his life and history, both major and minor, it paints a picture of their dysfuntional relationship. Sam could have been a world class pianist, if she had set her mind to it, and Roy could have been a world class father if he had tried at all.

Father Familiar unfolds over three scenes, all of them duologues. While each of the three scenes is incredibly well-shaped, paced and performed in and of themselves, there is very little sense of flow between them. This is not aided by the awkward and lazy transitions between the scenes. I thought theatre had collectively agreed that ‘the actors go off, the stage manager comes on in blacks and changes everything, then the actors come back’ transitions were a bad idea; they just slow everything down, as they do here. Father Familiar is a respectable 90 minutes long, but it feels much longer by the fifth or sixth time each of the plot points is stated and you are wishing it would move along a bit.

Playwright Branwen Millar plays some interesting structural games in Father Familiar, setting the last of the three scenes a long period of time before the first two. This does allow some interesting shaping of the plot and how it unfolds, but unfortunately, at the end of the day, it feels unneeded—as does the whole final scene, in my opinion. In its current incarnation this final scene of Father Familiar operates only to spell out rather bluntly the subtext that the audience works so hard to decode in the previous two scenes. It feels like Father Familiar doesn’t trust its audience enough to read between the lines. This is no crippling flaw, and, in fact, I suspect it would only take a few quick rewrites to change this (though maybe a few more would be needed to massage out the sense that this whole work is an exercise in telling rather than showing).

Stephanie McKellar-Smith’s direction is uncluttered and well thought through (with the exception of the already mentioned transitions). Both performances hover between very good and very, very good. They both, however, peak emotionally too early, meaning that there is no emotional build-up over the last third of the play, more of one sustained emotional note.

Almost the oddest thing about Father Familiar is that it’s not playing in Circa Two. With its solid script, renowned cast and older and more traditional target market, it seems practically perfect for that space, fitting easily among the work that usually is put on there. This is no bad thing. It just feels odd to see such a work at BATS. Maybe not exactly out of place, more unexpected.

Father Familiar
wri. Branwen Millar
dir. Stephanie McKellar-Smith
perf. John Bach and Mel Dodge

at BATS (www.bats.co.nz) at 8.30pm until the 2nd of October.
book@bats.co.nz or (04) 802 4175

The website on which the play My First Time is based—myfirsttime.com—is bleak.

It is a user-submitted catalogue of tales about people losing their virginity. It’s not as amusing as it sounds. But does somewhat reaffirm the easily assumed universal points of similarity between people’s first times—brevity, awkwardness and dissatisfaction. My First Time takes the anonymously submitted tales of the website and uses them as performance text (with occasional, and somewhat hokey, interjections from surveys the audience fill out about their own first times). This text is easily the weakest part of this production. While mostly inoffensive and usually rather giggle worthy, when it treads into more serious or weighty concepts, it stumbles. It rather hamfistedly pounds out truisms, and doesn’t seem sure enough of its own point to articulate it all that well. Also, that the conclusion of the work is to sum up the mass of issues and ideas that have arisen over the previous 90 minutes with “it’s always better the second time” is, in my eyes, simply lazy.

It stands as great tribute to this production, currently running at Circa theatre, that they manage to pull off such a magnetic and entertaining production with such a mixed bag of a text. The four-strong cast—Aaron Alexander, Danielle Mason, Simon Vincent and Judith Gibson—all do outstanding work. The material for the women is notably stronger than that for the men, Gibson, especially, giving a series of performances that reach far higher and truer scopes of emotion and reality than this flan of a text really deserves. The men make good work of several misjudged sequences—the text’s treatment of the issue of rape being foremost in its resorting to broad, ignorant terms, blurring the issues around the idea under discussion.

Ross Jolly has conjured from this lacklustre script a very worthwhile and amusing production. It may be slight and large stretches of it quite forgettable but, above all else, is funny. Like proper, out loud laughter funny. With Shipwrecked! playing in Circa Two and this in Circa, it is a good time to be a theatre fan.

My First Time
wri. Ken Davenport and “Real People Just Like You”
dir. Ross Jolly
perf. Aaron Alexander, Danielle Mason, Simon Vincent and Judith Gibson
At Circa Theatre until the 2 October

Distraction Camp advertises itself as being something entirely unlike what Wellington theatre has seen recently. This might be a slight over-statement, but there is very much a sense of difference, of stepping outside of the norm that hangs over the luxurious 90 minute running time.

It takes Jean Genet’s The Balcony as a provocation and text—but stops short of being any kind of direct “production” or “performance” of that text. It is set in a “house of illusions” in Christchurch (or maybe Wellington) 2009, where men come to reenact perverse images of control. One dresses as a bishop and drips hot wax on a sinning young girl. One is a judge attended to by a gimp on stilts passing judgement on a petty thief. One is a Nazi Camp Commandant. With all this recreation and reenactment, questions of veracity, truth and role hang heavily (along with a chandelier) over Distraction Camp.

The performances range from being very good to great. Peter Falkenberg’s direction and Chris Reddington’s design are both sumptuous and controlled, showing a very fine eye has been put towards the images, the plateux of the show. There is a real joy to be taken in the looking at of Distraction Camp. The show is very clearly aware of this and plays very much with the audience’s complicity in the voyeuristic act.

Distraction Camp is so sure of its images that it sometimes hangs on to them a bit too long. The biggest fault you can find with this show is that it just lets itself take a bit too much time. The opening wordless introduction sequence is a beautiful spectacle, and its shape and development work very well up to a point but very quickly it starts going just too long. This is a show that rides a line between being abstract and what some may see as self-indulgent. On which side of that line it falls is up to the individual audience member.

Distraction Camp
Directed by Peter Falkenberg
Performed by Greta Bond, Ryan Reynolds, Coralie Winn, Simon Troon, Marian Mc Curdy, Liz Boldt, George Parker, Emma Johnston, Chris Reddington, Nicole Reddington and Sophie Lee
At BATS, 9pm, 31 August—11 September 2010
book@bats.co.nz or (04) 802 4175

Shipwrecked! has a full title and that full title is Shipwrecked! An Entertainment: The Amazing Adventures of Louis De Rougemont (As Told By Himself). Which, rather helpfully, is quite self-explaining. This show presents itself as Louis De Rougemont (Nick Blake) recounting to a paying audience the (based-on-a-true-)story of how in his late teens he was shipwrecked in the Pacific and the numerous adventures that followed. Louis is ably assisted by two local players (Darlene Mohekey and Jackson Coe, former editor of these very theatre pages).

As much as this is a play about a formerly-shipwrecked man recounting his tale, it is a play about story-telling, about how we connect with other humans and the desperate need to be a somebody. It is also about riding sea turtles as if they were horses.

The spare and sparse design by Andrew Foster is a masterstroke and is lit entirely by desk-lamps hanging from the ceiling controlled with on-stage switches by the cast. Gareth Farr’s music (also performed by the cast) is another total triumph.

The greatest joy to be had in Shipwrecked! is not in its great performances or emotional intimacy but in just how properly funny it is. It is hilarious. Like, very hilarious. It is, after all, an entertainment.

Shipwrecked!
Written by Donald Margulies
Directed by Peter Hambleton
Performed by Nick Blake, Darlene Mohekey and Jackson Coe
In Circa 2, 28 August—25 September
www.circa.co.nz

It was a cold winter. Icy cold. Freeze your face off cold. The kind of cold that you wouldn’t want moving into the house two doors down from yours. The kind of cold you wouldn’t grant permission to marry your daughter, not that that would change anything after all—this cold doesn’t ask for hands in marriage. It takes them. That’s how cold it was. Steam did not so much cloud out of people’s mouths as escape like a crazed blue collar criminal digging his way out of minimum security prison with a spoon. I did not so much walk as glide down the ice slick side walk. Exploding fire hydrants had sprinkled the roads with deadly water. Ever seen water strangle a man to death in the hot midsummer while out playing lacrosse? Not a pretty sight. Not one I would recommend. I wouldn’t pay to see it again. Deadly stuff, water. Deadly like death by poison or falling masonry. No one knew why the fire hydrants had exploded. It was a mystery, a haunting riddle song lilting through the decrepit trees of urbania, a question silently yelled by every omnipresent aggrieved fireman. The police said they were investigating. But they say a lot of things. Lots of people say a lot things. Sometimes I wish I was back on that mime colony. Nice places, mime colonies—somewhat sparse though, a feng shui nightmare. How do you know where the energy flows when all the walls of your house are metaphoric? Questions beget questions it seems. I was on my way to the store to buy some food. I was hungry, see. Hungry not like the country Hungary, more like the country where no one ever has any food because business has gotten slow, gambling addiction means that I’ve had to sell all my other clothes to a homeless man for hug that I plan to trade for a miracle and win the lottery. That country was my soul, see. That’s right. Things had gotten tight. Money was low like back yard paddling pool with a giant leak caused by twelve-year-old chain smokers filling it with champagne that they somehow got their little mitts on. Finances were short like a dwarf that lives in a vice inside a shrinking machine on Jupiter.

I still wasn’t sure how I’d pay for the food at the store. I wasn’t beneath theft, I would do it if I could, especially since the last time I went to this store the keeper made a snide remark about my paying for a loaf of bread with pennies I stole with magnets from charity collectors. He cut me deep with his words, cut me deep like seventeen monkeys knife fighting with machetes in your living room with greased floor.

The December Brother has a lot of expectations to live up to. Not only is it “The Bain Play” that everyone has heard about but it is also the latest work from SEEyD theatre company.

SEEyD began in 2000 with a show, unsuprisingly, called SEEyD. From the very beginning they have been a company of profound and tremendous creativity and theatrical flair. Their stock in trade being the indepth and extremely balanced discussion and exploration of big issues. SEEyD was about genetic engineering, inSalt about the Māori land claims, Turbine was about wind power (and much better than that sounds written down). SEEyD, led by Tim Spite, are a power-house. A force to be reckoned with. If there was ever a theatre company that should make a work about that one horrible morning in Dunedin on the 20th of June 1994 it was them. It should have been great. It should have been amazing. Yet, I found myself underwhelmed.This is the problem with expectations, you see. The December Brother is, without doubt, a good play. A great play even. It’s just not SEEyD good.

Split very clearly into three acts, with each act being a self-contained show in and of itself, The December Brother’s structure is much more of an equation than an actual dramatic shape. The first act – a retelling of Spite’s father Tony Spite’s search for his real parents and the labyrinthian family tree that uncovered – plus the second act – a clinical and hyper-accurate re-enactment of both the prosecution and defense’s stories for the Bain killings – equal the third act – a totally fictional work that takes the previous two acts as a clear starting point. Telling the story of Rebecca (Nikki McDonnell), a vet who discovers that she was adopted. Her search to find her real parents throws her into the middle of the tangled legal case of Cain Fraser (Brad McCormick), a man convicted of murdering his parents. Though evidence that may have proven that his father was in fact the murderer was rejected on shaky grounds. 1 (Spite) + 2 (Bain) = 3 (Cain).

All three of the acts fair very differently and while it is an interesting way of structuring a piece – showing the audience your working, if you will – it doesn’t feel like a total success. The second act, the Bain act, the one everyone will be talking about, is by far and way the highlight of the world. It is a master class in tension and audience manipulation. The way it invokes, expresses and sustains incredibly complex emotions with such simplicity, efficiency and style confirms Spite’s place as a world-class director. The performances by Hadleigh Walker (as David) and Spite (as Robin) are breathtaking. Gil Eva Craig’s soundscape comes into its own in this act, with each tiny click and pop perfectly placed and timed. Jennifer Lal’s lights are an beautiful exercise in subtlety, isolating spaces in the group created set – a floor-plan of the Bain house. This second act is 20 minutes of heart-breaking theatrical perfection.

It is by their juxtaposition with the middle act that the other two falter a little. The opening act, written by Tony Spite, is clearly part of an ongoing exploration of the form of theatrical auto-biography by Tim (he directed Biography of My Skin and Lullaby Jock at Downstage in the previous year, both of which explore extremely similar ideas in extremely similar ways) and while he clearly has a flair for this particular form that does not stop if from feeling self-indulgent. I, personally, found it hard to care as much as he was asking us to.

The final act felt simply unfinished and rushed. All the right ideas are there, most of them in the right order. It really stumbles with where to pitch its comedy. The use of stereotypes – the gay lawyer for one, the broad South Island skank for another – doesn’t sit well within a work that asks its audience to question its assumptions about everything. There is a very fine full length work in this third act hoping to get out. I really hope that Spite and the rest of company revisit it and expand it into a fuller, more refined work at a later date.

SEEyD’s work always soars to its apex when Spite surrounds himself with people who are just committed, talented and mad as him. He works best when those around him can give his creativity a run for its money. While McCormick, McDonnell and Walker, are all very, very fine actors in their own right, they just aren’t the endlessly re-shape-able Tim Spite. SEEyD has in all their previous work, had a great sense of the ensemble, of the group, of a cluster of people chewing up the world and spitting out theatre, each cast and crew member and individual tooth in that theatre gob. What drags The December Brother down from being SEEyD great to just normal great is that that ensemble nature doesn’t seem to be there. Tim Spite is SEEyD but SEEyD should never just be Tim Spite which is the feeling you get walking away from The December Brother.

–
The December Brother
by SEEyD
wri. Emma Kinane, Brad McCormick, Nikki McDonnell, Tim Spite, Tony Spite and Hadleigh Walker
dir. Tim Spite
perf. Brad McCormick, Nikki McDonnell, Tim Spite and Hadleigh Walker

At Downstage, 12 August – 11 September 2010

Welcome wanderers. It is most gratifying to feel your eager eyes caress my words as ‘twere they delicate lilies in a pond of warm syrup. Your ocular grip tenderly explores every nook and cranny of my vowels and consonants. Your looks so coyly fondle my grammar. Oh, such exquisite pleasure. Oh.

Look, my soft yet strong reader, I am going to be straight with you. There is something growing between us. You know it. You can smell it. On the petri-dish of our relationship there is slowly growing a hot pink fuzz of, dare I speak it, loooooooooooove. Try as you might, you cannot deny the crackle whenever we meet, that erotic sizzle that shivers through your nervous system at the very thought of my presence. Every time we touch it is as electric as a thousand summer sunsets.

As a paean to the growing belt of lust that inextricably links us, this week’s predictions are of our next encounter, our next rendezvous. The stars have been so generous as to impart to me the intimate details of when we will next meet. Ooooooh.

For those among you who can wiggle your ears on command, our next meeting will be of a nautical disposition. We will both, unbeknown to each other, stow away on a yacht. Our hands will meet in the darkness as we scrabble from our respective hiding places deep in the depths of the Merrywink’s Seamstress (for that shall be the name of the yacht).

You will have hidden in a large crate of lime jelly crystals, while I will have ingeniously disguised myself as a bronze life-size statue of Hercules. A very convincing statue at that. You will have brought with you a torch with which you will illuminate our musty surroundings before finally falling on my stunning physique. Your gasp of erotic shock at my very presence will rumble like a warm volcano of longing.

“You… You’re Rutherford Dean! Horoscoper, love god and philanthropist!” you will utter under your already damp with romance breath. I will slowly nod my very manly assent. My finely chiseled chin cutting great arcs of power through the air, making your limpid heart beat double time. We will fall in a deep, velveteen embrace. Our dual warmths will merge into one glorious throbbing whole.

It’ll be great.

For you readers who cannot wiggle their ears on command, our encounter will be of a much more edible nature. As you start your new job at Wellington’s swankiest new eatery, you will be ecstatic to discover that I am not only a certifiable genius of the horoscopian, theatrical and written arts, but I also excel in the world of mouth fun. Over the hot pots and clattering plates we will literally dance a metaphorical tango of desire. The weight of lust hanging in your heart will quickly become too, too much to bear, and at the end of your first shift you will tempt me into the store room.

The Real Hot Bitches are nothing short of a phenomenon. Started only a few short years ago by a group of friends, the Bitches are a collective of “semi-professional” dancers. Their work always sweats pure energy and lycra. They don’t let a lack of technical dance skill or an active rejection of modern social public dress codes get in the way of having a good time.

After many small seasons at venues throughout Wellington, The Fierceness is the RHB hitting the proper big time. Downstage’s normally epic space is made to seem petite by the 30-strong cast being packed onto it. It is gratifying to see that something as rough, ready and Fringey as this making its way to one of the mainstream stages of Wellington. Especially when they sell out weeks in advance as they did with The Fierceness.

The Fierceness had everything you want from an RHB show, which boils basically down to semi-competent-yet-unrestrained-and-infectiously-unselfconscious dancing and many gratuitous costume changes. It was all there. The house was packed. The audience loved it.

And yet… Well, I just didn’t have nearly as good a time as I wanted or expected. The Fierceness works really hard under the guidance of Gabe McDonnell and Rosie Roberts to have a plot. We are paying witness to famed former world class semi-professional dancer Cynthia Sachet’s (Candy le Coque) auditions for her latest work. That work being The Fierceness. Time between extravagant dance numbers is spent meeting the auditionees and learning a little about their love lives. This attempt at story is far from wholly successful. It never really feels like anything other than filler as the offstage costume changes take place. It all ends up feeling just a bit too self-indulgent.

The Fierceness is, at points, the infamous party you aren’t invited to. Everyone having too much fun on stage to let you have a good time yourself. But not for long. While the story may leave something wanting, The Real Hot Bitches still rock.

The Real Hot Bitches in: The Fierceness
wri. Gabe McDonnell
dir. Gabe McDonnell and Rosie Roberts
dance dir. Emma Chinnock
perf. Bambi du Bois, Bonnie Lee, Candy le Coque, Cherry Ripe, CJ Lurtodanz, Coco la Chanelle, Cyndi Lamas-Arquette, Debrelle van Haler, Desaree Knightshade, Diamantina, Gem Wilder, Hellsta Murgatroyd, Je’mappelle Jeff, Lee-Roy Swayze, MaXine Hendrix, Megatron, Mercedes D’Silhouette, Mystique, Pearl Lusta, Pop Tart, Randi Knights, Rockit, Sasha Hot Sauce, Rex Carlisle, Tiffney Jan-Harket-Wahlberg-Wahlberg-Norris, Trixie Boom and Zontelle PomPom
At Downstage, 5 – 7 August 2010

UD: Well honestly I prefer to think of it along the lines of Brecht’s Messingkauf dialogues, which are more of a dialectic materialism than a Hegelian dialectic.

JC: I think the fact that both of us understand what that means is indicative of the root problem here, Uther.

UD: What root problem, Josh?

JC: The inherent superiority complex that arises from an eclecticism of education that is part and parcel of the modern BA.

UD: Are you saying, Josh, that the endemic lack of competition and absence of non-abstract benchmarks has made the BA an achievable dream for people who would otherwise struggle in other, more rigorously assessed degrees?

JC: Yes Uther. Yes I am.

UD: How so?

JC: BAs fundamentally enable the hobbyists to justify their lack of provable skill and measurable achievement.

UD: But not all people with BAs are deluded hippies whiling away their hours on weaving animal-scaled tea cosies. Many successful artists start with BAs. Look at me.

JC: I am, Uther. Believe me, I am.

UD: The real problem seems to be that BAs lack the clear developmental path into a real-world career that other degrees like an LLB and a BCA do. People aren’t taught to survive with a BA.

JC: Do you feel that this has something to do with the lack of concise focus within the degree itself? For example, I am majoring in Film, but this semester I am taking papers in Philosophy, Science and Language Studies.

UD: I think it’s partly that, but it’s generally quite a forgiving degree anyway. You can get through the whole thing without really finishing anything, which is a skill you really need in the real world. Especially if you want to be creative, like, I think we can safely assume, most BA students do.

JC: It does seem that the BA fosters an attitude of lethargy. It becomes far too easy to start something and then get distracted by frivolities. It occurs to me that there is a more profound problem at work here though. As White Middle Class Males we have a support network that is second to none. But we have been raised to take it for granted. Anyone getting what appears to be a better hand up than us inspires some kind of muted outcry, but realistically our greatest concern is the age-old question of Beatles or Rolling Stones.

UD: We’re trained to aspire to the future without preparing for the present. With that comes a great sense of entitlement and an almost Fascistic sense of what is right and wrong. We’re more concerned about how badly we don’t want to sell out than with the actual facts of the work we want to make.

JC: I think that the greatest challenge we face is the inability to instill a sense of discipline in BA students. Oft we are told that as adults we are responsible for our own self-discipline, but the reality is that in the modern work force there is an exercised regimen of control that keeps us on deadlines assigned by others. Rarely do we actually have the opportunity to decide our own timelines. But within the BA framework there is little to no backlash for not sticking to an arbitrary set of guidelines. This encourages us to focus on devising arguments for getting out of handing in assignments than it does on getting them finished in good time.

UD: That’s all well and good and I think we can all agree that there needs to be a greater sense of effort going towards the BA. But we have to consider what the degree symbolises as a whole. It’s the degree people take when they’re not good at anything else or misguidedly want to be famous artists. Nine out of ten BA students, even if they won’t admit to it, are in the programme in the hope that it will somehow magically lead to an easy life. To think in a right-wing way, how many artists can New Zealand society support? Is tightening up the criteria of the BA a way of stemming the tide and making life easier and fairer for the people who actually put the work into their art?

JC: Do you think that the gatekeepers of the BA are, at least, partially responsible for this?

UD: Yes and no. There is an element of “those who can’t do, teach BAs”, but at the same time there are an equal amount of lecturers who are genuinely talented practitioners of the art they lecture in. The problem becomes not one of a lack of talent on their behalf, but a lack of caring. As the funding of universities changes, I think we can agree, for the worse lecturers are forced more and more to teach things they have no interest in. So it’s easy for them to stop caring and allow mediocrity to flourish.

JC: Harsh sentiments. No less true for their callousness, but harsh nonetheless. Is there a wanton lack of regard for the real-world implications of getting a BA? We implicitly understand that as an artist the odds are that we are only going to make around $20K a year for the rest of our lives. We will never own our own homes and we will probably die destitute and alone. Under a bridge somewhere.

UD: Obviously. But, at the same time, that is what is so great about the BA. Sitting here in my honours year, staring bleakly down the barrel of my future, it is easy to be annoyed with not having done a “safer” degree. But, at the end of the day, given a time machine and a sense of purpose, I wouldn’t go back and change it. The BA has all the joys of making art, but with none of the real-world bullshit. You just have to make sure you’re ready for the real world on your own terms. Which, admittedly, the BA is not a big help with. How hard can it be, really?

JC: I don’t know Uther, I just don’t know.

UD: Hold me, Josh.

JC: No, Uther. No. And that is the end of it.

The Go Solo Season at Toi Whakaari is an annual event in which the third-year acting students perform 20-minute-long solo works. As a woman sitting next to me put it, “Go Solo is usually the cheapest and best theatre in Wellington.”

Group A

Helen Grant—Basted. Grant’s solid, interesting performance of Daphne Day, has-been TV host and plastic surgery addict, doesn’t save Basted from the fact that it doesn’t really seem to develop its ideas beyond their surface meaning.

James Tito—Untitled. While there is something undoubtedly worthwhile in the content explored about troubled childhoods and the universal yearning for fame, Tito’s presentation—that of just a man, a mic and a guitar—quickly becomes wearisome and self-indulgent.

Simon Leary—The Election. An interesting ‘high concept’ (a high school head boy election framing a discussion of homophobia) and an assured performance from Leary mark this out as a work that would be rewarded by expansion into a longer form work.

Meg Alexander—Untitled. Alexander spends too much time judging her character, the bolshy bar hound Karen, to let the audience really connect with her on her own terms. Also, the interesting storytelling device of karaoke is underused.

Group B

Jamie Smith—Untitled. Smith’s highly impressive circus skills—he climbs across the freaking ceiling—fail to carry an uninspired and underdeveloped ‘post-apocalyptic wasteland’ setting and story.
Ivana Palezevic—Promena. Palezevic’s brave decision to perform the whole piece in her mother tongue of Serbian is rather undermined by a pedestrian plot (that is entirely spelt out in the programme blurb). However, there are smattered throughout it some breathtaking images.

Michael Leota—The In-Between Space. Leota’s dynamic use of Krump as performative device stands out although the work as a whole disappoints in its lack of development.

Jennifer Martin—Ivylution. A delightful and quirky performance is enhanced by a glowing (occasionally overly erratic) text which gets the audience to take joy in the pure power of imagination. Also, dinosaurs. Would be lovely to see again.

Group C

Chelsea Bognuda—She Said, I Made, Done It. The rather beautiful performances in this piece about aspiration and bullying struggle with a text that at points seems to over-complicate itself for no reason, alienating the audience from the story.

Richard Osborne—Dickie’s Meadow. This high-energy exploration of ideas of prejudice doesn’t really live up to its promise due to a too terse running length (eight minutes when I saw it) and a failure to really unpack its ideas.

Tola Newberry—Pohatu. Newberry’s juxtaposition of the personal (the mundanity of plastering) with the political (the public reaction to the recent “terror raids”) is highly effective in its understatement.

Tess Jamieson—Untitled. Jamieson is clearly a very talented comic performer but she spends too much time over-emphasising her point (the distorted relationship between dreams and ambition) when she could be exploring it.

Group D

Catherine Waller—The Creeps. With endlessly impressive vocal and physical dexterity, Waller channels an engrossingly disturbing cast of characters that inhabit what seems to be a nightmarish fun fair. Unforgettable. A highlight.

Robert Hartley—D.R.E.G.S. Hartley paints an entertaining and in-depth portrait of self-inflicted social awkwardness. His character, Eugene, is a triumph of both performance and writing. Hope to see it return. Another highlight.

Melissa Reeve—Camera Obscura. La Donna Bruno Meets the Light. An intriguing and perfectly pitched exploration of the politics of the pictorial representation of women. A jaw-dropping combo of style and substance. Completes a hat trick of highlights.

Bianca Seinafo—Untitled. A very accomplished look through ideas of addiction—the use of KFC as the addictive substance is a masterstroke. Let down by some ill-judged and slightly racist humour.

Group E

Moana Ete—I Love You… Toru, Wha! Beautiful singing and a top notch performance hold up a needlessly flimsy plot. Also, you should not learn more about the inner workings of a character from the programme blurb than from the work itself.

Philip Ward—Untitled. Ward tells interesting stories and has a real charm about him. His failure to really commit to his ‘What should I do with my Solo?’ concept, however, makes the whole thing seem lazy and unfinished.

Esmée Myers—Curiousity Killed the Kid. A well-shaped story dotted with a few marvellous comic set pieces—condoms as waterproof socks, for instance—distract from a lack of thematic development.

Jonathon Kenyon—Untitled. Kenyon’s perfectly pitched almost robotic clowning is entrancing and the only real mark that can be made against this piece is that when he finally speaks, it is not quite as interesting as you want it to be.

Go Solo 2010
dir. Sophie Roberts
in the SEEyD space at Te Whaea, 26 July – 7 August 2010

Paper Scissors Rock is a story of both sisterhood and what it is to be a daughter. Bex (Bonnie Soper), Sophie (Colleen Davis) and Penny (Yael Gezentsvey, who wrote it as well) are three sisters. The day after a shock announcement at their mother’s 50th birthday celebration effectively destroys the bedrock of their family unit, and the sisters are left in the house they grew up in to reminisce about both the previous night and the previous few years—during which they have all been separate.

Gezentsvey’s script has a strong dramatic shape to it. The themes and feelings she’s wishing to evoke are also very worthwhile. However, it often gets bogged down in needless cliche and leaves things a bit too open at the end for the story to be satisfying in and of itself. Paper Scissors Rock is, all things considered, a strong first work for Gezentsvey and one cannot help but hope she produces more refined work in the future. Her heart is really in the right place; she just needs to be a bit surer with the structure and form within which she is expressing herself.

The performances are across the board solid. Bonnie Soper’s uptight but not rigid elder sister Bex finds just the right niche between being sensible and being cold and distant. Gezentsvey’s Penny, pregnant and conflicted, is more than workable, though there are snatches of the usual problems associated with a writer performing their own work. She has written for her own voice so at points seems to be failing to really do anything—she hasn’t written a big enough challenge for herself. Colleen Davis stands out as wild child Sophie, bringing a real heart, soul and arc to a character who very easily could have grated and annoyed.

The direction by Dena Kennedy is clean and clear, though a mite more modulation of the rhythms of the piece would have stopped it noticeably falling into a distracting monotonous rhythm from time to time. The uncredited set is nice, if somewhat standard—two couches and a table—and the great scenographic provocation of hanging strips of wallpaper is disappointingly not utilised at all.

Paper Scissors Rock is a solid and strong first work, one that would be worth further development and a longer form (this production runs to 40 minutes).

Paper Scissors Rock
wri. Yael Gezentsvey
dir. Dena Marie Kennedy
perf. Yael Gezentsvey, Bonnie Soper and Colleen Davis
at BATS theatre (www.bats.co.nz), 6.30pm, 5 – 14 August 2010

End Game is the latest work from Capital E for the 8 to 14 market. It follows on the tail of last year’s stellar Stealing Games. It tells the story of Alex (Dan Weekes) and Rosie (Amy Tarleton) his single mother, two people divided by their addiction to technology—Rosie to her Blackberry and Facebook, Alex to Fable Story, a MMORPG clearly modelled on World of Warcraft. When visiting Rosie’s dying father in hospital, a power surge throws them into the game Alex loves so much and they have to learn to work together to get back to the real world.

While End Game’s theme—that we have to appreciate what we have while we still have it—is very nice, and surprisigly complex for a children’s play, it is laid down rather heavy handedly in the script by Kate Morris and Rachel Callinan. The characters spend just a bit too much time explaining how they feel in every situation and every epiphany they have is restated into the ground. Also, while the use of the levels of a video game as a structure is an interesting one, it quickly forces the play into being just a bit too episodic for its own good. The work never really sticks together.

End Game, however, has a real success in its staging. Under the direction of Leo Gene Peters, puppeteer and voice artist Kenny King and stage manager Rebekah Sherratt bring to wonderful life the world of the videogame. The large Tetris-like pieces that make up the set are transformed (with the help of a large piece of fabric) into a swamp, a shifting mountain and a large talking trader robot. End Game’s sumptuous and simple theatrical spectacle would be impressive in any play, whether it be for children or adults.

This, along with solid performances from both Weekes and Tarleton, make End Game a success. Maybe a slightly qualified success, but a success nonetheless.

End Game
wri. Kate Morris and Rachel Callinan
dir. Leo Gene Peters
perf. Dan Weekes, Amy Tarleton and Kenny King

At Downstage, 31 July – 7 Aug
www.downstage.co.nz / www.capitale.org.nz

People Who Like Cats

Dear cat lovers. Bad news, I’m afraid. You are in for a week of disappointment. This will be a week of things annoyingly falling through. Best laid plans will dissipate like a cloud of flies fleeing a newly clean corpse. It won’t be your fault. People are unreliable sometimes, it’s nothing personal. You may just have to readdress your schemes for the next couple of months. Readjust your crosshairs, if you will. You’ll feel somewhat on a slippery slope leading on to an igloo marked ‘Nowhere’ in a township called ‘Obsolescence’, but it won’t work out that way. Things will come up. You will find other things to do. Like finally take those dancing lessions that you’ve been pondering for years. Or finally brew your own cider. Or start a religion based on your favourite colour (which is green by the way). Or, even, just have a nice little sit down with a cup of tea.  

People Who Prefer Dogs

Our star-based friends take somewhat of a sterner turn with you, our mutt-hugging friends. You need to stop and have a bit of a reassessment of your plans. The stars can see what you are thinking and they really advise against it in the strongest possible terms. You, right now, are on the edge of a precipice which contains only hurt feelings and bust emo guts. You need to think about other people right now and exactly what you’re about to do will mean to them. But, on the other hand, you could harden the fuck up. You don’t need to listen to these astral facists. Sure, some people may get hurt in your inexorable rise to the top, but, you know what, the weak and lame have only themselves to blame and anyone who spends their time whinging that life is unfair needs to stop their sobbing and crack life’s unfairness in the face with a mace of proactivity. Don’t listen to the stars, they’re just jealous.

I’m going to be honest with you. I have read maybe three Peanuts comic strips in my life. I don’t have any deep-seated hatred for it or anything of the sort. I’ve just never gotten into it; I’m sure it’s great. This puts me somewhat on the back foot when reviewing Dog Sees God, a play that centres on the concept of what the Peanuts gang would be up to in high school. Or, at least, I thought it did. One of Dog’s strengths is its openness; someone with no knowledge of the source material whatsoever can enjoy this show without feeling like they’re missing something.

However, Playwright Bert V. Royal has written a mass of contradictions into Dog Sees God. In a play that actively seeks to explore the facts and repurcussions of bullying, the audience is constantly invited to laugh at (as opposed to with) the protagonists. The contradiction of a play that asks its audience to judge themselves for the cruelty we inflict on each other in the same breath as getting you to laugh mockingly at the characters is not addressed to any satsifying degree, and there is the distinct air of Royal trying to have his cake and eat it too.

It is also far too long. This production advertises a 75-minute running time but, on opening night, ran to 100 minutes. Characters endlessly repeat themselves, every joke is riffed on just a bit too long and every plot point is stated and over-stated into oblivion.

Lori Leigh, the director, clearly feels a deep connection to this text and it’s a pity that, at least for me, that passion did not transmit. Leigh is a talented director with a good eye for images and great sense of shaping scenes. She has gathered a talented cast and crew who together have produced an amazingly well put-together show. They should all be immensly proud of their work towards this production and it really should be noted that the audience I saw this show with had a very good time. It’s just a pity that they’re working with a text that shoots itself so heavily in the foot.

Dog Sees God : Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead
wri. Bert V. Royal
dir. Lori Leigh
perf. Alex Greig, Alison Walls, Anna Harcourt, David Goldthorpe, Jessica Aaltonen, Louise Burston, Paul Waggott and Theo Taylor

At BATS (www.bats.co.nz), 8.30pm, 3 – 14 August
book@bats.co.nz / (04) 802 4175

Ned (Gavin Rutherford) and Joy (Heather O’Carroll) have been married 11 years and the spark is gone. Their cheeky chappy neighbour Dale (Christopher Brougham) narrates their tale of cookie-cutter suburbian repression. Things start disappearing from their house. First, it’s small things; cufflinks and the like. It soon escalates with larger and larger objects disappearing. As the house empties, Ned loses his grip on reality and things start to go a bit weird.

Parlour Song has an interesting premise, and for a few of the early scenes, it looks like it’s going to deliver. However, as the tension builds and the twists get turny, Parlour Song bottles out. The questions raised at the beginning are left limp through the overlong middle only to be answered, almost as an afterthought, at the end. However, the third act grinds so crunchily and inelegantly into a totally different tone and style that you are too busy being jarred by the new, unneeded theatrical grammar to care about any of the resolutions.

The cast all give well-shaped performances, especially Brougham, whose knack for comedy shines through. O’Carroll and Rutherford’s evocation of a relationship run cold is also well rendered. Susan Wilson’s direction is clear and clean. She does, however, struggle with the over-length of the script—it runs to 105 minutes and should, at most, be 75—you very quickly feel the length of the work. It should, at least, have an interval.

The set by John Hodgkins and lights by Jennifer Lal work together extremely well to carve a particular sense of place into the tricky space that is Circa Two. The AV projections by Andrew Simpson are a creative triumph in and of themselves, but feel often like a superfluous addition to the work as a whole.

Parlour Song is, at the end of the day, harmless. It is American Beauty writ small. And a bit dull. But it is far from a failure. The assured performances and stellar design simply need a leaner and more focused script to work with. When you leave Parlour Song you do not feel that you have wasted your time, you just haven’t gotten much in exchange for it.

Parlour Song
wri. Jez Butterworth
dir. Susan Wilson
perf. Christopher Brougham, Gavin Rutherford and Heather O’Carroll

At Circa Two (www.circa.co.nz for booking deets), 24 July – 21 August 2010

When I reviewed Mark Twain and Me in Māoriland’s first iteration in the International Festival earlier this year I said that it was a “brilliant mound of clay needing a firmer shape”. It was too disparate, too liquid to fully satisfy as a theatrical experience. Its many moments of sublime beauty and profound weight felt disconnected from each other, playing as more of a selection of scenes than a cohesive work.

What a difference a few months make. The company and crew of Mark Twain have clearly developed and refined it as they have toured it around the country. The bulk of what made up the first run of the show is still there, but with many minor tweaks, Mark Twain has had its Lego moment. It all clicks and fits together now, it is a whole and complete work. And what a work it is.

This return season of Mark Twain and Me in Māoriland is, easily, the best show I have seen all year. It is almost too good. It is the kind of great that makes you somewhat jealous that you will never produce anything of a similar scale and quality.

The play tells a fictionalised version of the most famous person in the world, Mark Twain, as he tours through New Zealand in the late 1800s to pay off his numerous debts. Stopping in Whanganui, he becomes embroiled in the aftermath of local land wars and, more specifically, the divide it created between the Maori who fought for the Pakeha and those who defended their land. It uses these events as a cipher to discuss much wider issues of the place of both Maori and Pakeha in modern New Zealand.

As much as Mark Twain is an elegant, subtle state-of-the-nation work that is brave enough to know that if it poses the right questions it does not in fact need to answer them, it is also an interesting and invigorating exploration of historiography. Historiography is the theory of how history exists as a system of stories that humanity speaks into existence. Mark Twain, with its stripped, almost-Brechtian staging, hides nothing and takes pleasure in revealing the technique behind their tricks. A boat paddling downstream is simply and effectively evoked with the sharp swishing of a water bottle. Empty coats fill the stage to be a corpse-strewn battlefield. The stage manager becomes almost a sixth member of the cast, bringing on and off smoke machines and hitting gallon bottles for gun shots. In its transparency, in its openness, Mark Twain makes you question the very nature of storytelling and how we communicate and mediate the past. Director John Bolton and writer David Geary expertly balance the wider philosophical and political gestures of the work with perfectly pitched personal stories, expertly expressed by the world-class cast.

Every element of this show is nothing less than breathtaking. From Martyn Robert’s sharp and simple lighting to Kasia Pol’s single white stripe of a set to John Gibson’s emotionally epic soundscape. Everything about Mark Twain works in perfect harmony to produce a stunningly complete and effective experience. The cast (Stephen Papps, Ngapaki Emery, Aaron Cortesi, Allan Henry and Maaka Pohatu) are universally excellent, all giving career-best performances and operating as one of the finest ensembles I’ve ever experienced. The sheer sense of connection and sharing between them was palpable and a commendable achievement in itself.

It is so easy to be apathetic in the theatre. It is so easy to sit there and just not care. Actors are, after all, professional liars. Pretenders skipping dementedly in a made-up land who you pay to see and encourage. The theatre audience is too often a landscape of knowing smirks and pointless, pretentious toffs. It is hard to connect in the theatre. It is often hard to feel in the theatre. This is not the case in Mark Twain. The overwhelming reaction I had after seeing this return season was not one of wonder at the technical brilliance of it or joyful curiosity at the questions it raised, but one of just being blown away by how much I had felt. By showing its process and sharing so much of itself, Mark Twain and Me in Māoriland allows you to connect on a very profound level with what is being undertaken. This is a play with a brain, a heart and a sense of humour. This is everything the theatre tries to be but isn’t.

Basically perfect.

Mark Twain and Me in Māoriland
Written by: David Geary and the company
Director: John Bolton
Cast: Stephen Papps, Ngapaki Emery, Aaron Cortesi, Allan Henry & Maaka Pohatu

At Downstage, 14 – 24 July 2010

Unfortunately, the fools at PUNZ believed EAR’s lies and have taken the deeply misguided decision to take away my membership. They tore my cards from my hands like electric frogs taser-tonguing a nice little acorn baby from betwixt its mama’s hands. Which leaves us in a little pickle. Without my PUNZ certification I cannot publicly perform divination in any form.

Never fear, I am, as I write these words beginning the lengthy arbitration-slash-reapplication process to get myself re-carded and thusly be once again able to share with you, my wee army of tomorrow-hungry readers, the future. However, this week it looks like we’ll have to try something a little different. I would simply have foregone this week’s column, but the two-headed Salient control beast Rarahundwu is braying for words with a thirst that can only be described as dementedly alarming, beating its leathery wings against the bile-stained walls of the Salient cove. So, to appease this voracious succubus of student media, I am going to use this space to address some things. I want to talk to you about the massive lies of Emma Rust. I know she’s been talking to you and I just want to set the record straight. I am going to align the crooked LP of your delusions onto a stylus of sanity.

FACT: I have never been to Mexico. This makes it impossible for me to have ever run a small bar in Mexico City which was much more of a front for white slavery and drug smuggling than it was an actual bar. It’s simply illogical! I couldn’t have run Little Diabolo’s Drinksarooni. I just couldn’t. There is no way I would have been able to deal with all the crazed regulars. Like Snowy Joe who was always trying to shiv the Dusky Maiden (a sumo wrestling transvestite). Do you really think that I, Rutherford Dean, would have the fortitude to club two Interpol agents to death with my long gel-hardened hair as they screamed and begged for mercy through ragged, broken hands, telling me of their children and how if I let them go they wouldn’t tell anyone?

FACT: I never licked poison crabs then spat their venom into the wide, vulnerable eyes of endangered owls as they heartbreakingly hooted in distress and fear.

FACT: I have never ever lied about my own personal wealth. Is it really so big of a stretch to believe that I often have so much cash secreted about my person that it becomes physically impossible for me to move under the weight of it, necessitating the purchase of two bionic legs to replace my own? Why can’t there be so many zeros in my bank balance that I had to switch to online banking simply because there aren’t enough trees in the world to produce enough paper to contain my monthly statements?

FACT: I do not need to feast on the flesh of the living to continue this harsh unforgiving half-life of an existence as I trudge this blasted earth, roaming between the hollow husks of buildings, searching for some glimmer of proof that life on this darkened orb of a hell spire has anything worth saving or remembering, as herds of ravenous jackals bite limply at my callow stringy flesh with their rubbery, toothless jaws because no calcium could ever have survived the event.

Now, let me tell you, my venerated readers, about our shared former friend, Ms Rust. She hasn’t seen The Wire. She never responds to texts. She friends people who aren’t her real friends on Bebo. She mispronounces Björk. She degrades metal. She thinks that shorts skirts empower her. Her parents bought her a pony and she was bored of it within days. She thinks that knowing things is the same as understanding things. She presses too hard with pencils. She sold weaponised plutonium to North Korea. I only broke her heart because she broke mine first.

Next week a return to future telling.

The Young and Hungry Festival of New Work has been running for 16 years and it’s stronger than ever. It was not long ago that it was the unerring trend of Young and Hungry for there to be one terrible play, one great play and one okay play. Usually in that order. Last year broke that cycle with three solid, watchable and very well-made works. The same can be said of this year. It’s great to see three good shows by young people, for young people. There is no real dud in this bunch, so season tickets are a must.

Song of Four (6.30pm)

In a worn-out day-after-tomorrow, the human race has lost the ability to reproduce. The dysfunctional group who hold the key to continuing the human race realise that the supposedly alturistic people who brought them together have a much more sinister agenda in mind. Old lovers with a lost child in their past are reunited.

While the points of comparison number about the same as the differences, Song of Four clearly owes a lot to Alfonso Cuaron’s tour-de-force film Children of Men. Starting with very similar concepts, where they differ is in the execution. While Men was harsh and immediate, Song is icy and distant. Men focuses very much on the philosophical implications of a world with no future, Song has a character that reads a book about philosophy. Men rushes forward all full of momentum, Song gets lost in uninteresting side plots and droops noticeably in the middle. Men reveals the unspoken past through glimpses and whispers, making its audience work to understand the world they’re meeting and the people they’re encountering. Song of Four foregoes such subtlety and gives everyone a good whopper of a speech or two to explain rather directly and clearly to the audience what is going on, what they feel about it and why they feel such feelings. In a play which should be about questions there are far too many answers.

This is not to say that Song of Four’s lack of depth is crippling. Many of its high points are when it throws itself whole heartedly into its broad strokes. The expositional news broadcasts are a particular delight, with actors Oscar Shaw and Alice Pearce giving marvellous and hilariously dedicated performances. The rest of the cast all acquit themselves admirably. Although the four leads, the four remaining fertile people in the world, do have an annoying tendency of falling into the same rhythm in all the scenes they share. Also, Vicki (Miranda Webster) has a propensity to yell at the top of her lungs, which becomes, at points, physically painful to hear.

Song of Four is far from a failure. It succeeds on its own terms, which is all you can really ask of art these days, but you have to wonder if its goal posts are set too low. Song of Four has an air of unearned self-importance. Its failure to explore or develop any real ideas more than hey wouldn’t it be funny for people to have sex on stage, drags it at points into self-indulgence. The wildly unneeded and mawkish (if very well executed) AV sequence compounds this even more.

Song of Four is well designed. You’re never bored and the people involved are clearly enjoying themselves and developing as theatre-makers. It just doesn’t have the guts to address itself on any worthwhile terms, and when you refer so heavily to a work that succeeds on just those terms like Children of Men, you’d have thought they’d have stopped screwing around and put some feeling into it.

Sick! (8pm)

Hannah (Alice Varcoe) is the Queen Bee at her school. Her posse is composed of the streetwise chessmaster ‘T’ (Acushla-Tara Sutton) and the recovering bulimic wannabe model Fleur (Emma Hayward). Together they take massive amounts of pleasure in tormenting their supposed friend Nalini (Anisha Parshottam), until the remarkably exotic Kilmineny (Lauren Gibson) shows up. Kilmineny is a master manipulator (part of me really wants her to take on Bond), and before the 50 minutes of Sick! is over, she has taken everyone for a ride.

Writers Ban Abdul and Antonia Bale have sewn together a pacey and loud explosion of a play. Paul McLaughlin’s tight direction means the energy drops and the focus never floats. Every note of the play is twanged to the highest pitch. Which is fine. Because Sick! is mental. Like crazy mental. Its characters talk in a jargon so crude and obtuse that it turns into poetry.

All five members of the cast have razor-sharp comic timing. You are too busy laughing at the joke-packed performance to really notice the pedestrian plot. Sick!’s only real problem sits in the moments when it tries to be more serious. When, rarely, it takes the mood down to lightly brush past some issue or other, it all falls apart a little. You have no sympathy for any of these characters, and why would you? They’re all, with the exception of the meek Nalini, clearly monomaniacal sociopaths. But since we don’t care about them, it is hard to take them seriously. Which is all fine, when so much of the play is there very much to entertain. But when it aims for somewhat loftier goals, when it asks us to care for them, it fails. The one exception to this being the scene shared between Nalini and her mother (Sutton), which is charming and endearing, if over long.

Sick! is slight. Some may even call it vacuous, but it moves at such a pace and the jokes have such a high hit rate that it’s easy not to care and just enjoy the ride.

Addendum—Many of my female friends who have seen Sick! have commented on how uneasy it made them due to how accurately it represented the all-girls high school environment. Which, put bluntly, makes me concerned for the psyche of most females.

Thinning (9.30pm)

Thinning tells the story of six friends who have just graduated high school and are celebrating by holidaying apple thinning in Nelson. Playing very much on the cusp between childhood and adulthood, this group of friends faces their collective (and individual) future.

Thinning comes from the highly acclaimed pen of Eli Kent—he wrote The Intricate Art of Actually Caring don’t you know, it’s kinda a big deal these days—and to be honest it does not really stand up to his wider body of work. His trademark ear for the music of modern speech is present, but often plays a little too loud with characters occasionally sounding as if they are trying and failing to do Eli impressions. The play begins with a promise to be messy, to reflect the mishmash of beginnings, endings and unanswered questions that this time of life brings. It, however, fails to hold itself to that gesture, wrapping itself up a little too easily for my taste.

The cast all do solid (if uninspired) work. The female cast especially struggle slightly to differentiate their characters from each other, which is not helped by them not really having much difference in how they are written. I honestly would have to spend the first few moments of each scene working out which girl was which. Jack Shadbolt does marvellous work as Isaac, the joker with daddy issues, but of course he would. He’s won a Chapman Tripp. What he’s doing in a Young and Hungry play is anybody’s guess.

Rachel Lenart’s direction is clean and lucid. She has clearly done a lot of work with the actors on the atmosphere of the work, and it has really paid off. Some oddly stilted blocking does mar some scenes, however.

The design is beautiful but seems to ignore the fact that there are people sitting in the first few rows of the audience, who, in some scenes, will get a severely restricted view. This is unfair on the audience members who sit there. There should be no “cheap seats” at BATS.

It seems like I’m being unduly harsh. So let me get one thing clear. Thinning is very good. Very, very good. You really should go. You’ll really like it. But both Kent and Lenart have done much better work elsewhere. Thinning does not meet the expectations that the names attached to it generate.

Song of Four
wri. & dir. Sarah Delahunty
perf. Miranda Webster, Oliver Humphries, Taylor Frost, Ana Harris, Charlotte Pleasants, Alex Rabina, Gabrilelle Berran, Oscar Shaw, Alice Pearce, Hannah Hollamey and Adam Goodall

At BATS theatre
8 – 24 July 2010
book@bats.co.nz or (04) 802 4175

Welcome back my weary wanderers to these dazzling pages of futures told and lives changed. As you will no doubt remember, the stars, my usual port of call when diving through the clouded pond of what is to come, are not being forthcoming.

They don’t like me anymore.

Me and the astral bodies are no longer friends. We are no more on speaking terms. Which is unfortunate. Not my fault. I didn’t no anything. I’m not the one who went around spreading venomous untruths about me. I DIDN’T DO THAT. DID I, EMMA? Oh no no no no. Did I? No. I didn’t tell everyone about that time with the pickle, did I? Or the ice cream cake incident. Eh? Didn’t talk about those? Did I? No. See, I have a little thing called tact. Ever heard of it?

Didn’t think so.

Look. I know you’ve had a hard life and things don’t work out the way that perhaps they should have but did you really have to go to running to all the astral bodies? Did you really have to tell them about… that thing?

Shhh. Shut up. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t need your hateful lies like missiles of deceit they are.

Anyway.

So, the stars won’t talk to me. End of story. We now must explore different ways of telling the future. This week we will be using that most ancient and venerated of techniques; hair colour analysis.

It must be firmly stated that we are discussing your true hair colour, not whatever bottled hue you have shoveled onto your scalp in the mundane hope that somehow changing your dank, insipid locks to some painful electric blue will change your life or make you funny or shade you interesting or stop that big gnawing hole of self-doubt that tears through your soul more and more everyday until you give up sleeping with pillows because of the massive spike in your power bill due to you having dry the tears out of it every single fucking day of your fucking life. So, we are talking about what colour you hair would be if you washed that gunk out of furry skull cover.

Proto-follicalist pre-pigmentary post-visualisation as the boffins call it is a surprisingly and alarmingly accurate form of future telling. Prepare to have your mind blown by the sheer and precise accuracy of the information that is about to textually occur in front of your readie eyes.

Let us start with you blondies out there. At 12:23pm on this Tuesday you will have an epiphany while tying your shoelaces. You will decide to become properly vegetarian. No more of this half-vegetarianism. In the bin for all your “I’m a moral vegetarian, but meat is just delicious and I know I shouldn’t but I do feel really bad about it.” As if that changes anything. This is a good thing. You should look forward to it. I know I am. Your life will shift. Animals will suddenly flock to you and love you. Every day after this Tuesday you will be awoken by a glorious choir of the most angelic and not at all annoying birds. Your health will wildly improve. You will be able to breath and feel emotions uncynically or ironically again. So, enjoy your meat tomorrow morning. Because it will be your last and then you will finally become a good person.

Now, red heads, you’re all in for an interesting week. On this Wednesday at 8:47am you will witness a fatal car accident. In between sips of your takeaway long black, a blue Honda will run a red light and hit a green Toyota. No one will survive. It will not be your fault, but that won’t stop you blaming yourself. What-could-have-beens will percolate through your brain. You will not speak, well, you won’t say anything of consequence for days. But it’s not all gray clouds and concrete punch. Things will begin to look up. You will fall in love immediately with the police officer who takes your statement after the accident. It will only take a little mild stalking to get them to love you back. We were given communication skills to communicate facts. Not shit. This will be your motto in your post-accident life. You will be shaken and shocked into a constant life long search for veracity. Your campaign with your lovely bit of cop at your side will be a massive success. You will become a superhero journalist and your name will be TRUTH PUNCH because when you PUNCH people they will bleed TRUTH. You must, however, be careful, because with great power comes great opportunity for awesome stunts. As TRUTH PUNCH, you will have a duty to find as many explosions as possible and to walk away from them in slow motion as techno plays. In your TRUTHMOBILE you must perform at least three wicked jumps every journey. Yes, it will be hard. Yes, it will be wicked cool. So, enjoy your last few days of normality. Oh, and don’t get in any Toyotas.

Now, brown haired people. You know you like to dance. I know you like to dance. Everyone knows. I think it’s the t-shirt that reads ‘You know who likes to dance? I do!’. You really should wear something else. That one is really beginning to smell. So, your dancing is going to get you in trouble. At 1:24am on this Thursday morning while jigging and jiving up a storm at your most favourite of boogie islands the Big Kumera (have you got any self respect?) you will trip and knock over a large, rather angry man’s drink. It will spill not just over him but all over the serial killer knitting circle who were attempting (and failing) to have a quiet night out at the next table. Just as Beyonce’s siren-like voice (we’re talking waking-you-to-stop-you-dying siren not come-to-my-island-please siren) announces that she is something to the effect of that she contains too much bootyliciousness for you or your close relatives, you will have to flee. Because, well, with that jazzy stumble, trip and drink-up-turn, your life as you know it is over. You will have to go on the run. You’ll be a fugitive. Like in that film. The Fugitive. You will need to be ready. You will, when you go dancing on Wednesday night, need to take the following things with you; fake passports from at least three different countries (two non-European), an off-road capable vehicle with a full tank of petrol, two blades (one concealable), one bullet proof vest and more tinned soup than you could ever hope to consume (good for bartering surprisingly). While it may be somewhat spasmodically unwieldy to carry. While people may mock your wildly overstuffed back pack (and believe me you can fit a Ute into a back pack. I have done it so you should be able to.) but it is a necessity to survive your new on-the-run life style. How you will dance with your world on your back is another question and one not for here. Sorry.

This week will be one of routine for the black haired amongst us. You will awake at 7:51am everyday. You will get out of bed at 8:02am after failed attempts at 7:54am and 7:59am respectively everyday. You will shower from 8:05am to 8:11am everyday. You will breakfast (tea and toast and tea) from 8:21am to 8:36am everyday. Then you will do nothing. Nada. Zip ah dee doo dah. Because that is your routine this week. Nothing. You will sit in a chair and stare at the wall. You will hum tunelessly to yourself for twelve hours until you need to sleep again. Everyday. No one knows why. Not even you. Well, you’re not even reading this. You won’t read at all this week. So, I can write whatever I want about you this week, you black-haired twat. You know no one likes you? It’s because you smell. You should hear what people say behind your back. They call you ‘Spackleface’ and ‘Krittleshack’. People dance mockery at you when you are not there. There are many secret websites dedicated to the vicious analysis of every single element of your life-style and attitude. No one disagrees that you are the worst kind of scum. Now, if you didn’t get so stuck in your grab-stack routines you would be reading this and you would know. But you won’t so you don’t. Ha.

Hey, baldies. Yes, I know that being bald isn’t a hair colour but you don’t want to be left out do you now? Your hairless week is going to be one of the shiny. Of the superficial. On this Thursday at 2:37pm you are going to catch sight of your own reflection. You will dazzle yourself. You will discover that, in your eyes, you are the most beautiful person in the world. You and your reflection will begin a sordid and passionate affair. Furtive flings in hotel mirrors, secret walks along riversides. You won’t tell your partner about your new found love. They wouldn’t understand and you don’t want to hurt them with the revelation that you’ve found someone better. And that someone is you. You are still fond of them, they’re just not you. You will think that you can keep this up forever. This two-sided love triangle. Of course you can’t. One day your romantic cat’s cradle will explode like a volcano packed full of magma and some more personal fluids erupting all over a stunned neurosurgeon. You and your reflection will become less careful in your passionate rendezvous. Your partner will one day walk in on you and yourself frantically banging away in the living room. There will be no amount of “This isn’t what it looks like” to glue back together your now be-sharded relationship. Then, your relationship will grow tired of you. With the electricity of all the sneaking behind backs gone, you and your reflection’s swinging clinch will dribble down the trouser leg of your souls. You will end up alone. That’s where your shiny and your superficiality will take you. Deal with it.

There is a reason that all the FAQs online about asexuality begin with questions like ‘I just don’t see how asexuals can be close to anyone. How can you have a relationship without sex?’ We as a society are so programmed to look for the sexy in everything that it becomes rather hard to conceive of people whose brains don’t automatically jump brain tracks to dirty town. Luckily this seems to be changing. Asexuality seems to be coming into fashion. Stephen Fry just outed himself as asexy. Apparently there is even one on Shortland Street these days. So as the blossoming flower of the asexuality movement comes into the public sun, it seems like as good a time as any to get the basics down about our cuddly friends: asexuals.

So, uh, how many people are asexual? Like heaps? Or none?

One in every hundred people is asexual, some sources say (and we have no real reason to disbelieve them). Which means that someone on your street is probably asexual. Try to work out who it is.

Could I, uh, I mean, could someone be asexual without knowing?

Well, it is possible, but it would be kinda hard to miss. The basic base level definition of asexuality is someone who simply isn’t interested by the idea of sex as a physical exercise.

That sounds dumb.

You’re pretty close-minded it seems.

Nah, I mean just… It… Nah. I mean, how do you… y’know, with a person if you can’t get a bit of the old how’s your father?

There are many different ways to be intimate that don’t involve taking your clothes off and doing mime trampolining. There is a really interesting (if at points a little sociopathic) series of blogs at asexualunderground.blogspot.com about how to take your conversations to the next level of intimacy. Also, hugging. Some people say hugging is overrated. That is clearly because they don’t hug enough people. Or have razors for arms.

So, do asexuals just spend their whole lives alone staring deep into the ocean of the lonely that is slowly drowning this world?

I think you need to talk to someone about your feelings. But, anyway, asexuals do lack a sex drive, but that does not mean they lack a romance drive. They can form relationships. They even get married. They sleep in the same bed. They just don’t bone. Not even on the phone. Asexuals can run the gamut of sexual orientation from queer to straight, from bi to dry.

Hmmm. So, uh, I think, uh, my friend is asexual and, uh, I… THEY… They want to find out more?

Well, www.asexuality.org is the home of AVEN (the Asexual Visibility and Education Network), which is the place to go for some good general info and interesting forums. Asexuality Aotearoa has information on how to meet asexuals around New Zealand.

Oh, cheers. My… my friend will real appreaciate that.

All G.

This week Mark Twain and Me in Maoriland, the latest work from Taki Rua productions, opens at Downstage after great success in the International Festival. It comes just on the crest of a mini-wave of Maori theatre in Wellington with He Reo Aroha in Circa Two and Te Kaupoi at BATS. All sit rather cleanly within the genre of Maori theatre, if it could ever really be reductively termed as such. They all have the combination of Western theatrical forms with the oral tradition of Te Reo. They all have the troubled family relationships. They all have the struggle for identity. They are, however, three very different works of very varying quality. Mark Twain is a masterpiece in a confused structure, and the biggest allure of the Downstage return season is to see just how far the play has come since its premiere. He Reo Aroha is a beautiful, if slight, gesture of emotion. Te Kaupoi is simply a dud.

Originally a performance space called the Depot before becoming a roaming theatrical production company spreading their own inspirational and inspired form of Maori theatre around the country, Taki Rua are renowned as masters of their form, and for very good reason. Their work is, almost without exception, poetic, powerful, moving and profoundly political. Taki Rua know what they are doing and for 27 years their shadow has hung long. The hard shine of the Taki Rua eclipse was cast very long across both Aroha and Kaupoi, both of which where directed by Taki Rua alumni. He Reo Aroha, by Hone Kouka, writer of some of Taki Rua’s most famous and powerful works. Te Kaupoi, by Nancy Brunning, a powerful actress whose profound capacity for emotion defined what some are calling Taki Rua’s golden years.

Both shows have, at their centre, a love story. In He Reo Aroha, we see the story of Kaia (Kali Kopae) and Pascoe (Jamie McCaskill), a seemingly perfect couple who seem just to never find the circumstances to properly reconcile after a number of misunderstandings and arguments. Te Kaupoi gives us Zeke (Jason Te Kare) and Sarah (Kay Smith), who seem to get together for no apparent reason just to give the plot something to do as it lazily dribbles from beginning to end. The difference that, as an audience member, you cared about Kaia and Pascoe. You wanted them together. You didn’t give two tosses about Zeke and Sarah. They might as well have burbled like babies for the overlong 90 minutes of Te Kaupoi for all we cared about them.

Both shows strived for the lyricism and inherent poetry of Taki Rua’s work. Again He Reo Aroha succeeds where Kaupoi fails. Not only in its charming songs but in the quiet domestic dialogue of the small town, Aroha manages to eek as much emotion out of its words than out of its story. Kaupoi is filled with cringe-inducing attempts at the same thing. Mere (Tina Cook), Zeke’s kinda estranged mother, fixes his shirt and all he can manage to gurn out is the groan-inducing “If only everything was fixed with a needle and thread.”

Te Kaupoi’s biggest flaw sits not in the shouty performances or the shunting, erratic emotional arc—which is not so much an arc as EVERYONE FIGHTING ALL THE TIME—but in just how blatant it is. Set in the near future, after the removal of the Maori seats caused massive civil unrest, every Maori person is assumed to be a terrorist and the Resistance is inspired by the mysterious pirate radio DJ Te Kaupoi. With only one male in the cast, the shock reveal that Zeke is Te Kaupoi is not so much a twist as a limp head-tilt. This concept has much promise and there is a lot to be explored in it. It just isn’t. Te Kaupoi manages to be simultaneously too oblique and too obvious to pay attention to. One of the twists, the big final reveal in fact, is so obvious from about five minutes in that it actually becomes rather comic that the characters haven’t worked it out as well. Taki Rua has set the bar extremely high when it comes to the Maori political theatre. Throughout their work they manage to be both wide-ranging and subtle. They let the audience work it out for themselves. Te Kaupoi seems to have no trust in its audience’s intelligence, as characters time after time after time monologue, unironically explicitly stating the morals of the play. Te Kaupoi doesn’t only make a point, it shoves it like a javelin into your bemused face.

He Reo Aroha’s success lies in its delicacy, in its small scale. It didn’t feel the need to be broad. They know, as Taki Rua does, that the more specific a story is, the more people can relate. It is the detail that draws us in. The delightful portrait that the two actors paint of the small Northland fishing town where the majority of the action takes place is so detailed that you cannot help but feel you have visited it.

Where Te Kaupoi tries for Taki Rua’s scale and fails, He Reo Aroha aims for their intimacy and more than succeeds.

He Reo Aroha
wri. Miria George and Jamie McCaskill
comp. Hone Hurihanganui, Kali Kopae and Jamie McCaskill
dir. Hone Kouka
perf. Kali Kopae and Jamie McCaskill
at Circa Two, 16 – 26 June 2010

Te Kaupoi
wri. Whiti Hereaka
dir. Nancy Brunning
perf. Kay Smith, Jason Te Kare and Tina Cook
at BATS theatre, 10 ­– 26 June 2010

Mark Twain and Me in Maoriland
wri. David Geary and the Company
dir. John Bolton
perf. Maaka Pohatu, Stephen Papps, Ngapaki Emery, Aaron Cortesi and Allan Henry
at Downstage, 14 – 24 July 2010, book at www.downstage.co.nz

Theresa Rebeck, the writer of Mauritius, Circa’s latest main stage work, has a background in writing for TV. It really shows. Mauritius is a tightly structured knot of a play, every event building inexorably to the next. It works so hard to be suspenseful that the tension becomes palpable. Its story revolves around the discovery by Jackie (Danielle Mason) of two extremely rare stamps in her deceased step-father’s collection. They are the Mauritius “Post Office” Stamps (the one penny and the two penny) from 1847. It’s the faults that make stamps valuable – these stamps should read ‘Post Paid’ but in fact read ‘Post Office’ – and the combination of this rather impressive mistake together with their age make these two stamps, as we are constantly reminded throughout the play, the holy grail of philately worth millions of dollars.

We are quickly introduced to our cast of characters, all of whom want those stamps for various reasons. Jackie wants to sell them so she can escape the city for some barely-hinted-at reason. Mary (Lyndee-Jane Rutherford in a career best performance), Jackie’s half-sister, wants the stamps as they are her last connection to her long-dead father. Dennis (a lugubrious Andrew Foster) wants to broker a deal between Jackie and Sterling (a solid Jeffery Thomas), a cowboy businessman with shady connections and a great deal of love for stamps. Philip (a delightfully meek Aaron Alexander) owns the philately emporium where the deal is to go down. Things, of course, go far from smoothly and there are many twists and turns.

When operating at its best Mauritius is an engrossing, if slight, thriller. There are some infrequent explosions of violence (well choreographed by Allan Henry but clumsily executed by the cast) seemingly designed to emphasise the stakes of the piece. These are somewhat ineffective. Its biggest fault, as a piece, being that well, at the end of the day, they’re just stamps and you are never really made to care about the characters enough to want them to succeed either. The film Carousel is an extremely good example of how to make stamp-collecting interesting and entertaining for the non-philatelist audience, and perhaps Mauritius should have taken a few more notes from its pages.

Mauritius also suffers from being noticeably a bit too long. Rebeck’s razor-sharp structuring is undercut by her propensity to let her characters go on too long. People break too readily into speechifying and plot points tend to be rather overstated. This needs to be a tight 90 minutes not its current leisurely two and a bit hours.

Ross Jolly’s direction is clean if workman-like. John Hodgkin’s set is well-detailed if a shade too sitcom-inflected, and Ulli Briese’s lights insist on hiding the revolving of the set, which steals some theatricality from the play. The score’s echoes of the Seinfeld theme also caused much amusement between me and the person who came with me.

Mauritius is no failure. The performances alone are worth the price of entry (if you can afford it), and the script is gripping enough to make you largely ignore the fact that you’d be really hard pressed to actually care about the goings on. For a play about stamps, Mauritius is a lot better than it could have been.

Mauritius
wri. Teresa Rebeck
dir. Ross Jolly
perf. Danielle Mason, Lyndee-Jane Rutherford, Andrew Foster, Aaron Alexander and Jeffery Thomas

at Circa Theatre, 26 June – 24 July 2010

Salomé is an Oscar Wilde play bit it’s not an Oscar Wilde play. That is to say that it is not what you expect and Oscar Wilde play to be. Rather than a stately and witty satirical romp around social rituals full of finely honed epigrams and put upon butlers, it is a one act symbolist exploration of the story of Salomé who so famously danced for the head of John the Baptist.

Anna Kamaralli has directed it at 77 Fairlie Tce using the students of THEA 301 – Company as her cast (the work towards this production forming the severe majority of their course-load) and the students of THEA 324 – Scenography as her crew and designers. It is a bold choice of play and one that results in a bold production.

The studio in 77FT has been decadently filled with a sumptuous and epic set of long walkways and twisting netted columns. This set designed by Jen Eccles, Sophie Hanover and Jane Wenley is very well conceived and extremely well produced. However, multiple sight line issues for anyone not sitting in front row of the traverse somewhat degild this lily. The lighting by Sam Steeds and Kattral Lee is wonderfully colourful and compliments the overall design very well but the frequently loss of actors faces to shadow annoyed this audience member (maybe I was just sitting in the wrong place?). The costumes by Sophie Sargent, Katherine Jennings, Daniel Emms and Stella Reid are real nice too. The A/V by Jess Robieson and Cassandra Philp, sound design by Kattral Lee and Srini Twigley and music by Theo Taylor and Holly Antonsen are all almost without flaw and more than up to a professional standard.

The cast all do perfectly fine jobs but special mentions must go to Stella Reid’s wonderfully meek Young Syrian and to Theo Taylor and Danni Taylor for their Soldiers who amused throughout.

The boldest move made by this production is the addition of a prologue. This works very much to evoke and interrogate the similarities between Salomé and the Hebrew Song of Songs. It seems sure to divide audiences (and that is hardly ever a bad thing) with its poetical language and abstracted choreography. Personally it rang a trifle too pretentious for my taste and that somewhat rings true for the whole of the show. This production of Salomé seems unwilling to really open up to its audience and share its sources and secrets, it feels like it is a few too many steps ahead of you and is unwilling to let you catch up.

To call Salomé a mixed bag is to give the impression that the good and the bad balance out. This isn’t true. There is a large weight of good in this show, it’s just some hard to catch sight of.

Salomé
presented by the students of THEA 301 & 324
wri. Oscar Wilde
dir. Anna Kamaralli
perf. Alana Henderson, Josh McDonald, Blair Everson, Holly Antonsen, Joe Waymouth, Rachelle
Fons, Brooke Charles, Luwita Hana Randhawa, Sophie Sargent, Cherie Le Quesne, Danni Taylor, Emma Eglinton, Theo Taylor, Stella Reid, Susie Berry, Annemieke Dabb, Daniel Emms and Katherine Jennings

at 77 Fairlie Tce, 7.30pm, 1 – 5 June 2010
book by emailing theatre@vuw.ac.nz

Willem Wassenaar has, with one of the two current classes of Long Cloud Youth Theatre, adapted Antoine de Saint Exupẻry’s classic children’s story The Little Prince (the other class presented a very well-achieved, very physical and present workshop selection of scenes from Romeo and Juliet). It is the story of a curious young man (Patrick Carroll) who lives on his own small little planet. With a rose (Fran Olds) that is in love with him. You know how it is. He explores the solar system meeting several rather peculiar grownups. These include an oddly fair-minded but still rather eccentric King (Lucy Suttor), a tragically conceited man (Jonathan Price), an even more tragic tippler (Ben Crawford), a very job-demarcation oriented Geographer (Isabelle Stewart), a sociopathic Business man (Ngakopa Volkerling) and heartbreakingly steadfast Lamp Lighter (Jonathan Price). He then arrives on Earth in the middle of the desert in Africa and meets a pilot (Jack Buchanan) who also serves as the narrator of the story (this narratorial role was taken by the whole company). On Earth, the little prince learns many worthwhile lessons and meets some rather inexplicable animals. Then he has to go and tragedy really begins to set in.

The Little Prince‘s power as a story sits in how gently and simply it expresses some profoundly important and complex ideas about human nature and how people interact and how simply we can harm people without thinking. While it may superficially seems to be little more than a childish tract on how grown-ups simply don’t understand, it is, in fact, about ideas of loyalty, understanding, love, sharing and all their inherent complexities when people get involved. It is one of the triumphs of this production that all these ideas are just as present on the stage as they are in the original text.

Presented in the round with the cast sitting with the audience sharing the story as they would with a large group of friends. The only design feature is that all four walls of the space are covered in child-like drawings which feature heavily in the work. The feeling of intimacy that this setup and the performances build was really quite delightful and one has trouble thinking of any other way that this story could be presented.

The cast show skillful-beyond-their-years style, élan and teamwork. This excessively good kind of performance is, of course, now routinely seen in Long Cloud’s productions. While all the performances are all incredibly watch-able and nuanced it would be remiss to not mention Patrick Carroll’s performance as the titular wee prince. A wonderfully pitched evocation of the naivete of childhood that never dipped into laughable ignorance.

Over the 75 minutes or so, Long Cloud weft a wonderful, truly captivating work and one can only hope that it will return for a longer run perhaps in a slightly more refined – design-wise – production.

The Little Prince
wri. Antoine de Saint Exupẻry
dir. Willem Wassenaar
perf. Patrick Carroll, Jack Buchanan, Isabelle Stewart, Ben Crawford, Fran Olds, Jonathan Price, Lucy Suttor, Ngakopa Volkerling and Michael Boyes

At WPAC on 28 & 29 May 2010

As a growing, glowing impasse is building between between me and the stars, I am turning to other forms of divination. If you skepflicks and doubters make head shake that I was all night up look in my future know you have to big spit your ignorance flem into a spittoon of humble pie. I need not our starry bodied to tomorrow know. Far from it.

As was more than proved by my previous foray into talking to the dead, I am an expert in all forms of supernatural tomorrow telling. Over the next few weeks I am going to take you, my slavish readers, on a journey through all the forward calender flick tricks I have in my meaty brain grasp.

This week, I will by reading your future by analysing your chosen tea preparation. I was taught this deep, dark and disturbing practice of tea mix analysis by an aged master. He resided in the lost hills of Untacte (a land so obscure many assume it to be simply fictional) in a large castle made of tea-stained wood and regret. He is, on first impression, much more walrus than man. He was a cruel master. He made me drink more tea than there is fluid in the Pacific ocean. I wept tea but learnt and then mastered his mysterious ways. It was tough, like early morning meals of wallets, but I stuck with it. See readers, when I am on to a good thing I stick to it rather than fearfully fleeing no matter who I hurt like, for instance, just off the top of my head, Emma Rust.

But, I digress.

Using my powers I can see that the coming week for those among you who prefer an unadulterated cup of tea. Black that is. No milk. No sugar. All tea. See, you like keeping things simple. Under control. You are one to nicely subdivide your life, keeping all your little lives and friends and feelings in nest wee networks of boxes quietly swept away in your head. You spend so much time adapting to different situations, being different yous for different thems, that you have lost sight your real self. Your actual you is buried deep in one of those boxes, on the underside of your mind. Sometimes you’re afraid that you don’t even feel human emotions anymore. Sometimes you forget. But most of the time you’re fine. Dribbling through life, clicking all life switches. You found your balance, your stasis. Until this week. This is the week that your giant mind Jenga of metaphoric brain boxes falls, shattering and irreparably scattering your selves, your many mini-yous to the four winds. You will be found out for the shell you are. It will be caused by something as slight as a cafe filled to the brim with people from all your different walks of life. Your worlds will clash, crash and like a falling cement brick on a busy veterinary clinic, the hideous truth of your interior life will splat across all the horrified passers-by and bystanders. There is no way to avert this. It is fate. All you can do, black tea drinker, is brace yourself. Loin your girds. Toughen yourself. Because this week is going to emotionally scar the shit out of you.

Happier tidings are in store for you “Just some milk, please” tea drinkers. The coming week will be one of little whimsies. Tiny delights will pepper this seven day globe jaunt. A child will giggle on the bus. You will see a day trip of pensioners eating melty ice creams on a nice day, their noses white with creamy sugar mash. You will reunite with someone you haven’t seen for months and have just enough to catch up on. You will hear your new favourite joke. It will be about ducks. You will finish a really good book. You catch a fly ninja-like with your bare hands and your friends (who love you just for being you) will applaud unironically. You will get the correct amount of sleep. You will drink some fucking amazing tea. You will always have an umbrella when you need one. You dance. You sing. You discover a new talent for being both honest and tactful at the same time rather than wildly alternating between them as you are4 so want to do. You will look at the clouds and everything will be better and all the weight within you will life. You will floss twice a day. You meet a cat and no dogs will bark at you. You will just let things happen. You will tell a good secret and hear some too. You will never need a manifesto. You will remember. Everything doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be fine. You will have a good week and all just because you take milk with your tea.

This week bares greyer fruit for all of you whose hot drink equations Eat Sugar Tea = Mouth Drool. Out of ten you will charitably rate this week a five. It will be dull, unexpectional. Things will just happen with the dull clotted banality of every other godforsaken moment of your existence. A perfect slick stew of “It’s okay, I guess.” The world winds to the same click drudge that you have not yet quite learned how to self-medicate against yet. The food will be tasteless. An uninflected thousand yard middle distance stare will scar the optic holes of all around you. Your internet will be slow and you will be just as good at procrastinating as ever. You keep thinking you’re getting a bit sick as a handful of unwanted twinges clatter through your nerves every other moment or so, but annoyingly this week you are, once again, fine. You will continue to judge homeless people and cross the street to get away from charity collectors. You will your tea with sugar to sweeten your life. It doesn’t work.

For the mixers, the double-ups, the milk AND sugar AND tea people, this week is one of decisions. Being the only child that your are, you always have been very good at having it both ways. You know the thrills of the two way bet on the two way fight. Any situation, any outcome can be turned to your advantage. Your favourite move in rock, paper, scissors was always bomb. Bomb beats everything. Will it did. It used to. Because, this is the weeks where the cards will be on the table and for once you will actually have to choose a side. Don’t act surprised. Close your open hanging mouth. You knew this day was coming. You can only play both sides for so long. In your pores and bones you irked the roar of this coming wave of decision. So, feel lucky that you have this warning, this advance knowledge, because because when the time comes you will not have ponder clock. It will be a snap decision and without the forethought that this gracious warning is affording you, you won’t know what to say. Choose now, choose a side, else your life will sail away like an interior yacht of science catching an especially gusty wind. You have been warned. You won’t listen.

And if you , honestly, just prefer coffee, this is your week for gouging out your own tongue with a lady razor. Now, don’t get me wrong, coffee is fine and all. Good for a kick in the brains when you need a mental jog and your cerebral cortex can’t even roll out out of its macadam caked cot. But tea is just better. This is fact. It is a fundamental, logical, universal truth. Feel free to disagree. Write into Salient letting me know of your coffee love, tell me about that time that a cup of coffee saved you and your family from a violent intruder in your house while a mug of tea was crying in the corner paralytic with fear. You are more than welcome and I promise to respond to every single piece of correspondence on this issue. But I also promise that all my response will simply be a signed photo of myself with the caption ‘You’re wrong.’

The Intricate Art of Actually Caring is the little show that could. Starting as an intimate production in the 2009 Fringe performed in a bedroom it was soon met with universal critical praise and sell-out crowds. A return season as part of Downstage’s annual ‘Pick of the Fringe’ season and wins for Most Original Production, Best New Director (Eleanor Bishop) and Best New Actor (Jack Shadbolt) at the Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards secured its success. Having toured the country, it is now returning to Wellington with a strictly limited season at BATS.

To discuss this triumph return, Salient theatre wizard Uther Dean sat down for a chat with Eleanor Bishop [producer/director], Eli Kent [writer/performer - 'Eli'] and Jack Shadbolt [performer - 'Jack'].

Uther – So, let’s get the obvious questions out of the way, what is Intricate Art about?

Jack - It’s about two 21 year olds, Jack and Eli, on a road trip to visit New Zealand’s greatest poet James K. Baxter’s grave. It’s something good to do post their friend’s death, it’s an inspiration to kinda carry on. It’s a bit of a road trip story, but the purpose of the road trip isn’t just to go on a road trip. It’s to get to a place where things might become clear.

Uther – You’ve being doing this show on and off for about eighteen months. How has it changed since it, somewhat infamously, premiered in Eli’s bedroom?

Eli – Well, we had this massive gap of about 6 months so coming back was a bit ‘woah’. We could see it with fresh eyes. You could see all the stuff you could make better.

Eleanor – I think it’s chilled out a lot more in a way. It’s returned to some of the stuff that was really good about the bedroom. It’s just really relaxed and I think we lost that a bit doing it in theatres and getting really caught up in the stuff of it. Having to without some of the comforts of the bedroom. We had to figure out ways that it could retain some of its magic.

Jack – It’s hard to adjust to a theatre, because the audiences we played to in the bedroom were so small that we could speak at room level and stuff like that. We get on to a bigger stage and there is a lot more space that we have to deal with. With the third time, when we went to Christchurch, we hit on this OHP idea, where we could kinda minimalise it all back down so there wasn’t any stuff hanging round and you could kinda make an area of the stage that we stick to mainly and the whole time projecting images behind us all manually as well. It gives the actor something else to do.

Eli – It’s kinda busy but it doesn’t really disrupt the performances when you’re actually acting. Like when we were at Downstage and actually at Christchurch as well it was quite kind of they were both kinda messy.

Eleanor – And full on.

Eli - …and both of our performances were all kinda AAAAAAAAAAAARGH. Now, uh, one thing we did with the new was that we tried to chill out and really look at the steps of the friendship and where it starts and where it ends.

Eleanor - Because in Dunedin we got a stage where everyone sorta knew what they were doing so we could actually return to their relationship, to Eli and Jack’s friendship and their connection, particularly Jack’s connection with the audience which is really different now but was a really strong part of the bedroom but is totally different now that it is playing in theatres.

Jack – I hope when people who come who’ve seen previous seasons they’ll enjoy that because we essentially tell them that we’re telling the same story and they’ll be like “oh, okay” but they’re gonna use different methods of telling it – the OHPs and stuff really enhance all that. They beautifully, the pictures on them are done beautifully by Erin [Banks] and Heleyni [Pratley], we don’t just straight up put things on and leave them there. We’re gonna do other stuff using the light. It’s just a cool new way of telling the same story.

Eleanor - There’s this really cool sense that like they’ve set this all up. They’ve got a couple of OHPs and hung some sheets up and…

Jack – …they’ve got some people coming over.

Uther – This show has proven itself to be quite elastic, moving from the bedroom to Downstage to BATS and you talk about stripping it back and you’ve totally transformed the production of it. Is this because this particular script is especially elastic or could you do it with all theatre?

Eli, Eleanor & Jack – …

Uther - I don’t know what that question means.

Eleanor – Yeah.

All – …

Eleanor – I think because, it was always when we started and had a script but lots of elements got writeen in for the bedroom and bits tha we wanted to do got written in and things and that’s just kind of… it hasn’t changed too much but new things come in according to new stage business that comes in. Because Eli wrote it so it really easily evolved like that.

Eli - It’s a funny one as well though because we do still have a room and we start in the room which is sorta confusing. The room feels more like a symbol now. The fact that its no longer performed in the room but the room is still in it is quite ‘oh, why did they choose to set it in a room?’ and we have our reasons for that.

Uther – it’s always been, from even the fringe season, its always been incredibly well recieved, with only one or two exceptions. There was no warm up period, you’ve always been well-revieced. How does that feel?

Eli - We didn’t expect it to be nearly as well received as it was. It sorta feels like in a sense that now we have to keep it good and every time we do another one we’re really afraid that people won’t like it. [Laughter.] Because its changed so much. Like the downstage one, we thought people weren’t going to like it as much as the first one. And with this one, it’s the same fear. That it’ll loose something.

Jack – We’re essentially doing the same thing we did in Dunedin and that was really well recieved. There’s no fear for me at this point.

Eleanor - It’s very liberating taking it to new places, like after Downstage and all that fucking hullabaloo really about ‘where’s the bedroom?’ so soon after the first season and mentally having to shift into a different zone and going to Christchurch and Dunedin and people not having heard of us or anything and just coming along to see the show and then really liking it is just completley liberating and awesome. So, I’m actually slightly nervous about BATS.

Jack – I just hope that a lot of the people who see us at BATS haven’t seen the show before. I’m not really into people seeing us for a third time when other people can’t get tickets and stuff because it’s such a limited season. I hope one day we can do like a month long run somewhere so every man and his dog can come if they want. Y’know?

Uther – Well, touring must come into that and you’re going to tour more…

Jack – Yeah, we’re confirmed for four more seasons after this. We’re going to Auckland in the middle of June, Hamilton at the start of July as part of the Fuel festival. Then later in year around September, October we’re going to the Melbourne Fringe and the come back and finish out the year in Nelson. It’s cool taking it to a wider audience and I just really like taking it to new people and giving them a Wellington kinda story.

Uther – Because it is in many ways, at least to begin with, a very Wellington-centric play, how is that part of it recieved in places that aren’t Wellington?

Jack – Well, there’s always the odd person who knows exactly what you’re talking about in New Zealand. It’ll be interesting going to Melbourne, lots of them probably won’t even know Baxter even though he is an internationally renowned poet. People seem to generally see past the Wellington stuff and see gthe story. You need a location for every story, I guess.

Eli - Auckland willl be a funny one as well. It won’t be a massive change. There’s always a slighty different feeling whyen you do it in different places.

Uther – What has always struck me about Intricate Art is how it sits kind of seperate from the rest of your output as company. Not in any negative terms but where as your previous shows like Rubber Turkey and Bedlam where very much in a heightened, almost absurdist mode where as IA is much realer and smaller. So, I always wonder where it came from, not where the idea came from but where the show overall came from?

Eli - I think, part of it is that a lot of it was done, a lot of the poetry in it was done before we existed as a company. There is a bunch of stuff in it that is from a time before the Playground collective and that is one of the reasons it has a slightly different feel.

Eleanor - To me it was always having an idea of theatre that it’s always different from everyday life – so that absurdist kind of thing – and thinking that was the kind of work I wanted to make and then Eli giving me this script and being like “Holy fuck! This feels so like me.” And feeling a little bit guilty about that. “I can’t put this on stage because it’s just us.” Y’know? These are the lives that we’re living and it’s just a bit self-indulgent. We should make things about important stuff but then thinking that if you make from your heart, that is the most important stuff and that will speak to people. And you shouldn’t feel guilty about that.

Jack – You really want the audience to relate to stuff in it.

Eleanor - Yeah.

Uther – What is it, do you think, that has connected so much with young people?

Jack – I think young people like the dialouge of it, the interaction between the two of us. The banter. The roadtrip thing treally connects with them. The older generation like looking back to what they might have been like. Everyone goes through little bits of their lives where they’re like ‘fuck fuck? what do I want? and what do I need to do to get there? and how do I feel about all this?’ and they really like the Baxter stuff and the poetry and that’s another generation older. We had a couple of old people, in the their 70s, in the front row in Dunedin who smiled the whole way throughout. I like to think they were Baxter fans back in the day.

Eli - I’ve never really know what it is. What I’m interested in is not nessissarily what other people will be interested in. Because I always though it was about God and doing it in Dunedin made me realise that more. That this is essentially something about God and its absense. And how in that absense how people can still contain morals. Our generation can connect with that sort of stuff because a lot of us were raised athesitis but then it’s like… what do you do with that? What do we have in terms of belief? We beleive in science but that doesn’t give us morals.

Jack – You feel guilty for sinning even though you don’t believe in god.

Eli - I think there is something in that which is obviously not a completly new thing but exists a lot more in the show now than the last time it was here.

Jack - It strikes a real cord with young people which is really cool.

Eli – [Laughs].

Jack – What are you laughing about?

Eli - “It strikes a real cord.”

Jack – You strike a real cord.

Eleanor - So, it was funny. Now its like “Lets do this there” and make a big splash and I’m like “Oh god.” The best thing we ever did was make this thing because we really like it and we think other
people will really like it in Eli’s room in the Fringe and be really low key about it.

The Intricate Art of Actually Caring is on at BATS theatre from the 1st to 5th
of June with a 4pm Matinee on the 5th. Book by emailing book@bats.co.nz or calling (04) 802 4175.

You should also check out their super sweet website at www.intricateart.co.nz.

Tea for Toot is the story of two old and lonely sisters, Emily (Alex Lodge) and Georgia (Cherie Jacobsen). They heavily routine based lives in Water’s Edge, the former residence of their mother Mary Waters. She was an acclaimed, prolific and now very dead children’s author. Not that Emily or Georgia would ever acknowledge the deceased nature of their mother. Residing still in the nursery they grew up in, to them mother is simply upstairs too busy to take guests or answer fan-mail.

Regularly punctuated by cups of tea, Emily and Georgia’s schedule is one of rigorously scheduled delusion. At 11, they write their memoirs and scrapbook. At 12, they have tea. At 1, they play sleeps – a demented game of make-believe where there fantasies reveal themselves to be both surreal and mundane. At 2, they have tea. Then a spanner appears in the works of their meticulously executed ignorance of the cruel facts of their existence in the form of a letter and the force of industry and reality has no choice but to force these two into action.

Toot is narrated by Rachel More very much in the mode of the books on tape that seem to accompany all memories of childhood car-trips. She comments and guides the action of the play as well as telling one of the tales of Toot, Waters’ most popular character, accompanied by some nice shadow puppets made by Hannah Smith.

The cast all acquit themselves nicely. Lodge and Jacobsen perfectly pitch the music of age to the tune of childhood. Lodge is a natural comic genius and Jacobsen has an undeniable watchability and charm. Richard Falkner impresses in a small role as a man who may or may not be Toot. He gives a case study in how well and real smaller parts can be played, as totally real, fully formed people with their own stories who happen to brush up against the one you’re following.

Ed Watson’s direction is assured and clear, even if he does let the show noticeably droop in the middle. The script was devised by Lodge, Jacobsen and Watson is much funnier than it has any right to be but tends to hide what is a very solid structure under some flabby and over long scenes with some ideas feeling rather overstated and over-emphasised.

The tone and pitch of the show is incredibly complete and consistent. Hannah Smith’s decayed, domestic set has just the right air of age about it. Rachel Marlow’s lights are, as always, very good and Tane Upjohn-Beatson and Gareth Hobbs’ soundtrack builds a very nice sense of the world both interior and exterior of the show. While the shadow puppets that I’ve already mentioned are very well made, their use in the show is rather clearly under-rehearsed and rather shambolic. This makes them substantially less effective than they could have been.

Toot‘s eccentricity is very well balanced by a deeper consideration of ideas of decay, mortality and sibling relations that run well weft throughout it.

The clear (and directly and openly cited) inspiration for this show is the life and work of Enid Blyton, especially, obviously, focussing on her daughters. Reports very heavily vary on Blyton’s mothering skills. Toot does a very good job of exploring the ideas of and around Blyton at the same time as playing a distinctly different enough game with the character of Mary Waters that one never really has to raise the question of ‘Why didn’t they just actually include ol’ Enid in the show?’ Toot is a compelling dance through the profoundly twisted aftermath of a mother who was, at best, absentee, at worst, something a lot more sinister.

Tea for Toot‘s greatest strength is its infectious whimsy. This is a nice warm mug of theatre. Designed for heart cockle thawing on cold evenings. It perfectly mixes the white noise chatter of the aged with the exuberant explosion of those permanently stuck in childhood – there is a particular delight to be taken in their very precise mispronunciation of some words. It is claustrophobic without ever being gratuitously depressing.

It is without a doubt a good show but its success is not unqualified. Its middle stretch is simply too long – mayhap they could have done with the pressure of a one hour slot rather than the 75ish minutes it is now as an hour would have been a much leaner and cleaner show – this is both an issue of pace and an issue of needing cuts. Also, the ending when it arrives becomes a little too obvious a little too quickly. But these are merely quibbles and Tea for Toot still comes highly recommended.

Tea for Toot
6.30pm / 21/05 to 05/06/2010 / BATS theatre (www.bats.co.nz)
book@bats.co.nz / (04) 802 4175

devised by full.stop.theatre
directed by Edward Watson
performed by Cherie Jacobsen, Alex Lodge and Richard Falkner with the voices of Rachel More and others