DEAR NEAL, Please note our production is called “ShitShow”, not Shit Play. I have left it up to my fellow Bouffons to answer your questions. I’m sure you will find their answers insightful and inspiring. Regards, Sir Arthur Throbsbottom 

What is adaptive dramaturgy?

Tits. Tits and ass. Boobs and bumholes. But mainly tits

For that matter, what is “dramaturgy”?

See above. Also, minge.

Is this production part of your course-work/ assessment?

No we all love the shitloads of extra rehearsals and meetings we’ve had to do on top of our other University work. This is purely so we have no chance at a social life or leading a happy existence.

Why did you choose Ubu roi? or was it chosen by the Lecturer?

Can one truly CHOOSE Ubu Roi? Or does IT choose YOU? Also, herpes.

Is this the full play or excerpts?

Excerpts of what exactly? Asian porn? Documentaries about Child Labour? Because yes. And no. And yes. And menstruation.

What is the purpose of the project?

What’s the purpose of YOUR project? Jeez.

How has the group gone about the creative process?

Mainly naked.

Why the title ShitShow?

You’re shitting me right?

Is “The Unconventionals” simply the name you have chosen for this class production?

It came to me in a dream. MacGyver flew down on the back of a golden Unicorn, wielding a life size carboard cutout of Jesus. It was at this point that I noticed my erection. I’m not sure where this is going, but to answer your question, Poo noodle.

What influences does this production draw upon?

LSD. And Shrooms. Oh, and Yummy Mummys. Audiences are so used to seeing “shocking” things in other media, how does Shit Play ensure audiences are shocked whilst actually making a statement? Here’s a picture of a bunny.

What is the statement the play makes?

If we wanted to make a statement we would have organised a press conference. Fucks sake.

Is there a place for such shock-tactics in the theatre? Or, put another way, does the theatre need to be more shocking to keep abreast of other forms of entertainment?

Everyone loves tits. Thank you for writing Breast in your question. About fucking time we got to the point.

Gerald Lee

Verdict: 1/5

When you have a film that arrives with such a significant amount of fanfare, you expect something that provokes as well as entertains. Inevitably, such lofty expectations are rarely met and such is the case for Joss Whedon’s The Avengers. Its shiny veneer fails to hide a derivative film that doesn’t deliver on its grand promises.

For a film about a group of social outcasts and rebels, there seems to be an awful lot of conformity to standard filmmaking tropes. There are glowing, mysterious objects of power, aliens who detest the human race and weapons that shoot deadly beams of light. Every plot element is tired and predictable, only serving as a flimsy pretext to the next extravagant explosion.

Perhaps Marvel’s colourful cast of superheroes could counteract this? Sadly not, as the characters appear as flat clichés who all seem to have been written with a single character trait in mind. Iron Man wisecracks, Thor bellows and Captain America broods. Only Mark Ruffalo’s turn as the Hulk exudes any sort of nuance, but he is criminally under-utilised. Joss Whedon is famous for subverting genre conventions, however there is very little evidence of his ability for narrative depth or complex characterisation.

Moreover, the film indulges in the morally dubious ideas typical of the superhero genre. The film is dripping with post 9/11 imagery and ideas of American triumphalism. Every scene seems to scream the virtues of America, as the noble heroes defend the people from aliens who seemingly act without conscience. There is none of the nuance of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. Coupled with a criminally overlong middle section and you have a film that is brash and bold, but has remarkably little to say.

Perhaps I’m being a little harsh. The Avengers is serviceable entertainment but it is also exceedingly mediocre. People may like to pretend that this is Marvel’s magnum opus but in reality it is no better than the standard popcorn fodder, it just took more money to make.

Disclosure: Contrary to what the above may imply Gerald does actually like to have fun from time to time.

Cory Knights

Verdict: 5/5

The Avengers is without a doubt the greatest superhero film of all time. It may represent everything that’s wrong with Hollywood but it’s done so expertly that it works like a charm. Joss Whedon has presented us with a film that is well paced–barring the first 15 minutes–and gives credence to the comics that paved the way for the Marvel cinematic universe. Dripping with humour, the film gives us some of the most fully realised superheroes on the big screen. Arguably, each doesn’t get enough screen time, but this is an inherent limitation of having seven main characters.

The big draw card is obviously to see Thor, Ironman, Captain America, and Hulk all square off and these moments are superbly satisfying. Whilst we definitely see that “some assembly [is] required”, the most captivating moments in the film are witnessing these different ideologies and perceptions unfold and come together. A personal favourite is the unlikely friendship that Tony Stark and Bruce Banner strike up. The camaraderie that follows underlies a few of the more subtle plot points later on in the film.

The action beats are executed logically and with a sense of geography. From trailers, many critics were quick to point out that the “Avengers assemble to save a block of New York City”. This was even addressed, adding to the Cap’s usefulness as a team leader whilst subtly highlighting Marvel Studio’s infamous frugality.

As every single critic has noted, Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner is the unexpected shining star. He authentically portrays a man who genuinely cares for others and his slow realisation that the Hulk can be somewhat a blessing in amongst a green smashy disguise. Remember you don’t always want him to hulk out!

The Avengers is proof that character and dialogue are just as important as plot and set pieces. The film’s minor flaws are wholly eclipsed by the sheer joy that it brings to anyone with even a mild interest in superheroes. Joss Whedon has made yet another masterpiece that will be the superhero film that all others must aim for.

9.30, Friday night. I sit at a booth, staring into six-dollar Castlepoints (which is crazy, San Fran can’t even pull that shit) and avoiding the glances of the middle-aged patrons. My entourage is all otherwise engaged–selling tickets, stacking shelves, attending Young Labour parties. I’d rather be with any of them.

The guy next to me–let’s call him Road House Kevin Dillon–tells his mum that she should “offer to look after the baby. You like being a grandma.” He walks to the bar and mumbles incoherently to LA Woman as it pipes into this crushed-velvet kingdom.

It’s 10:30pm (I’m wondering when gig times on posters became guidelines). The crowd has started to arrive. It’s like a convoy of bogans have arrived at their Eden, a blissful place where they meet hipsters, fuck and create the perfect hybrid. There are more chains on pants than there are cardigans and boat shoes. The cast of a Tim Burton-inspired student film are here.

I grossly overestimated Bar Bodega’s hipster cred.

I’m here to see Bikini Roulette. Lead vocalist Matt Pender used to front OdESSA, a band I had a week-long love affair with in 2008 after seeing them open for Supergroove at the old Union Hall. They won’t play until midnight. Before them, at 11:15pm, is Lady Parts. They open with a solid jazz-rock jam, like an uptempo Fat Freddy’s Drop. I’m not averse to this, nor to their musicianship generally. They’re at their best infusing rock with Mayfield-style soul-funk, like in the unfortunately-named ‘Casanova Sauna’– they’re infectious and genuinely fun. But the lyrics and vocals are Grinderman without the self-awareness, AC/DC without the personality. The lead singer’s voice alternates between ‘gravelly’ and ‘Creed’; the pinnacle of his penmanship is juvenile blokey-bloke nonsense–“I’m on my second bottle of scotch/and I’m only thinking with my crotch.” Deja Voodoo was making fun of these guys before they existed.

Bikini Roulette make the night an exercise in opposites. Pender is blistering, a consummate performer–a little over-rehearsed, but energetic, handsome, ridiculously charismatic. His bandmates, some I think I recognise from the days of OdESSA, mesh perfectly with Pender, switching between white man funk, southern rock and Motorhead-lite riffs with swagger and style. It’s an exercise in affected showmanship, with its heavy American influence and its matching outfits, but with songs like ‘Play Dead’ and ‘Second Hand Soul’, it doesn’t matter. They’re just too damn good.

Saturday night. I’m called back to Bodega with two friends for Tommy Ill’s ‘album release party’. Bang! Bang! Eche! and Golden Axe are in support.

We miss Golden Axe because we are drinking wine at one’s flat and talking about comics and Alphabethead.

We arrive a couple of songs into Bang! Bang! Eche!’s set. The venue is reasonably packed. It is hot. I buy a six-dollar Quilmes. It is “Argentina’s Favourite Beer.” Argentina needs better taste.

This is the first time I have ever seen Bang! Bang! Eche! live. Apparently they are an institution; but then, I am new(ish) to the New Zealand gig scene, which is why this is a semi-travelogue. I don’t take notes. It is good, frenetic, aggressive hipster dance music (by which I mean you can bop your head to it and maybe wave your arms for a song). Lead vocalist Zach Doney is a bristly, arresting presence. I dig the electronic music-meets-The Fall sound.

Tommy Ill happens. He is rad. Kelvin Neal and Buck Beauchamp make out and bounce around and shit. The guy on the keyboard gets his clothes off. Tommy gets the room to observe a moment’s silence for MCA before launching into a barnstorming cover of ‘Sabotage’. They do ‘Living Dead’ and it is phenomenal and the mosh pit (led by a rogue in a blue shirt, a recon man for his posse) almost destroys my small fragile body. There are Hawaiian shirts. ‘Coldest Summer’, easily the least upbeat Tommy Ill cut, is the encore, which is a bit weird, and the crowd is ridiculous and barely tolerable, but these are the sacrifices we make. There is a crazy amount of glass on the floor. It is quite great.

I think I like San Fran better, though.

What is occurring now, though, is an interesting blending of the forms of the environment with the agendas and purposes of environmental lobbyists and activists. While motifs inherited from the environments around us have been common for a long time, the use of them to influence people’s views and actions regarding the Earth and the way we treat it is a new development. Organisations such as Greenpeace and Forest and Bird use strong visual campaigns to induce people to donate to and join their cohorts. Alongside these interest groups sit political parties who have also taken up the dogma of environmentalism and attempt to put their ideals into practice; in Aotearoa, for example we have the newly invigorated Green Party.

The Green Party experienced unprecedented success in the 2011 election for many political and social reasons, but their performance was definitely enhanced by their use of the visual medium. The light lime green used in their election material was visually striking but, more importantly, it was a different shade to the deeper forest green associated with the Green Party in the past. The effect of this rebranding was compounded by the inclusion of human figures in the posters, pamphlets and online marketing. This marked an interesting departure from the traditional marketing methods used by environmental groups in the past, where most of the imagery was focused on stylised versions of natural forms inherited from flora and fauna. The shift in colour choice and the inclusion of human figures reflect a rebranding, but they also act as visual signifiers to imply to the viewer that the Green Party has changed and now has a broader and fresher vision for the future of New Zealand. The campaign was a piece of fantastically cynical marketing. By placing young, dynamic looking people in front of a lime green background the Green Party managed to market themselves as an environmental party that acted for people, not just the environment they lived in.

The work done by the Greens last year represents a departure from the age-old tradition of environmental groups advertising themselves as evangelical figures protecting the natural world from the blight of humanity. The cleverness of the Greens’ campaign lay in placing the human element on the side of the earth, as opposed to in opposition to it. In contrast, the aesthetic campaign of Forest and Bird sticks to the dogma of protection instead of collaboration. Their main image is a tree shape composed of figures representing the animals of the sea and land. Their imagery works for their target audience, as it affirms the beauty of nature and works as a metaphorical image symbolising the way nature is made up of many disparate components. The imagery of the organisation is complemented by their motto, “Giving Nature a Voice”. The combination of their lime green background–eerily similar to that of the Greens–the tree of life image and a concise mission statement allows Forest and Bird to directly appeal to the guilt that people feel over their impact on the environment.

The difference of the effect of the marketing between Forest and Bird and the Green Party is a direct reflection of the differing goals of the two organisations. The Greens need to get people on side and influence them to vote for them. This requirement means that they need to use their visual campaign to include the human in the narrative of the environmental struggle. It also represents the way the party has shifted slightly politically to having complex policies in fields other than protection of the environment. Conversely, Forest and Bird needs the more striking imagery to push people into taking action. Both organisations heavily employ visual tactics to influence their target audience, but their aims mean they both have to approach their marketing in subtly different fashions.

Call me a cynic if you like, but what becomes apparent from looking at these campaigns is that people are sheep to be herded by visual imagery, and this truth is just as apparent in the world of environmentalism as it is in the realms of business or corporate marketing.

Perhaps a reflection of what is happening around them on a much larger scale, it is the Westerner De Zoet’s sudden yet unrequited desire for a wise and scarred Eastern midwife, Orito, that sets the plot (and, one can believe on reading this increasingly eerie novel, the massive smoke-shrouded cogs of some ancient form of Eastern mysticism) in motion.

De Zoet moves between a mundane island existence and the court—and brothels—of a not-quite-translated Nagasaki, until a regrettable decision sends both Orito and the reader into the cold and hostile forests, to a fortress shrine whose sinister practices slowly unravel, the effect of which reverberates back to Nagasaki.

Fan of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten may initially be disappointed by the linear structure of Thousand Autumns, but it would be a short-lived disappointment; the author’s stunning wordplay, coupled with thorough research, will leave the reader dazzled by, and ever so slightly aghast at, how a mind like Mitchell’s must work.

Having received the long-list nod from the Man Booker judging panel, we will just have to wait and see what’s next for De Zoet’s Japan or rather, as Mitchell much more romantically puts it, his Thousand Autumns.

It was with the expectation of infinite sadness I started Blue Nights. I don’t like biographies, at least of the living. Knowing so much, however biased, about someone leaves me arid. But I was compelled after reading Didion’s recounting of the year following the death of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking, with its Spartan beauty, stark and essential pain, to read Blue Nights.

It was meant to be about the death of Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo. It is about far more: mortality and memory, the life left behind and the life departed. Didion’s austere, incisive writing seems to ask how one can assess the life, let alone the death, of someone vital to your existence. What spaces are left vacant in their passing?

Death and mourning don’t make for happy reading, but when difficult and piercing subject matter is written about with such skill and honesty, it offers us a companionship and capacity for reflection that we can take with us when we ourselves are confronted with pain and loss.

How can I convince you that this is vital reading? This act of remembrance and re-visitation of experience, all reconsidered and weighed with a yearning, heartfelt intellectual struggle to understand, will tear and heal something in you.

Didion has created, through an evocation of memory, an aching, hopeful revocation of mortality. It is an incantation, beautiful and staggeringly complete, of a life. The wonder of it is that, in the end, I didn’t know whose: Didion’s or her daughter’s. They are inseparable.

BATS Theatre, 2 May, 9.30pm

In 324 AD, the Roman Emperor Constantine I founded his capital on the site of the ancient Greek colony of Byzantion, and modestly named the new city after himself. A mere 1688 years later, Barnie Duncan and Trygve Wakenshaw have converted this great drama into a clever, funny, and engagingly surreal little comedy. This is not a history that Eusebius of Caesarea would recognise: Duncan presents Constantine not as a great general and politician, but as a hedonistic pepper-addict with a taste for dance-music and aqueducts. The great St Athanasius of Alexandria does not make an appearance in this story, but there is a blond DJ called St Peaches, and Constantine’s famous conversion to Christianity takes place not at the Milvian Bridge but in a nightclub called Studio LIV. This increasingly-outrageous travesty of the past is smart and witty, but it all really serves only as a pretext for Duncan and Wakenshaw to show off their brand of bizarre and oddly charming humour.

Many of the best scenes in fact do not involve the eponymous Emperor at all. Clasping a pair of horseshoes in his fists, Duncan assumes the role of Trimmingbeard, a horse who has decided to change his name to Kyle (“why did I change it? I can’t say. I just like it better that way!”), while Wakenshaw plays his amorous horse-masseur, Gary. If it feels a little as though this Pythonesque premise has been tacked onto a whole different concept, it hardly matters: what holds the play together is not a plot (it never discovers one), but rather the brilliant timing of the two actors and the perfectly-pitched slapstick of the script. Wakenshaw in particular has some great moments of physical comedy, including a long but strangely-compelling opening mime sequence, and the few props that are introduced are developed to great effect. Nothing goes to waste: even the bed-sheet togas that the actors wear are exploited to their fullest comic potential. The counterpart to the fine timing of the actors is the professionalism of the sound and lighting crew, who never miss a beat. Although the production is obviously – and even ostentatiously – low-budget, sound effects are matched to action with a precision that would be the envy of many plays with much higher production-values.

The promotional material for Constantinople promises that “comedy has never been more Byzantine.” If ‘Byzantine’ is taken to mean ‘involved, convoluted, and labyrinthine,’ this is surely an exaggeration: for all its lack of plot, Constantinople is sweet and simple. Its complexity perhaps lies elsewhere, in the unabashed pleasure it takes in hybridity and anachronism. If it is absurd to end a play ostensibly based on the life of a fourth-century emperor with a Young Turk called Rod Stewart and his ornamental ottoman, then it is perhaps no more incongruous than a pair of New Zealand actors taking to the stage to extol the origins of the second Rome. The flickering image of that golden city retains its enchantment, but Duncan and Wakenshaw refuse to let us take it entirely seriously. The delights of incongruity – the joys of weird and fantastical juxtapositions – are not the least of the many pleasures of this charming show.

Constantinople runs until 5 May, 9:30pm. Tickets cost $20/$14