Gilbert has made a brave attempt to say a lot with very little. There are only a few actual lines of dialogue throughout the piece, and the rest Gilbert tells with her body and by making sounds, mostly with her mouth. She does this well enough to construct a loose understanding of her piece, touching on the objectification of women’s bodies in media, particularly in rap music, the male “savior complex”, and the idea of women needing to be beautiful. But that’s about it. It felt as though Gilbert was hoping these small interactions would all speak for themselves, but as an audience member, they left me feeling confused and unsure of the connection of themes being presented.

Thematic and meaningful messages were lost in abstract interaction going on with the audience all throughout the performance. Some of Gilbert’s mouth noises were understandable, i.e. Gilbert getting the audience to tell her she was beautiful, but other parts of this interaction, and her responses, didn’t make sense, such as Gilbert pretending to be a cat and getting the audience to bark like dogs at her as she squealed and ran back stage. People were laughing, and willing to interact, but it felt like we were playing a game, and rather than it advancing the performance it got audience members so caught up in interacting that the story on the stage got lost. Several members of the audience gave it a standing ovation, but I wasn’t sure if that was because they’d gained an understanding I’d missed or because they wanted to show that they, above others, understood this abstract performance that had just taken place.
Abstract theatre has a place, but there was too much left unsaid in Soft Tissue for it to be able to communicate clear meanings and understandings to its audience. Ideas presented need to become more well rounded and transparent for the piece to resonate with wider audiences.
It must be said that regardless of what I did not enjoy about Soft Tissue, that Ella Gilbert is a wonderful performer. What she did bring to life on stage was passionate and intriguing, and I do sincerely hope she continues work on this piece, because it is full of so much potential.

What happens when your current partner meets your ex? What’s the protocol? What’s off limits? Should you do MDMA together? All vital questions that plague Rob, Annie, and Jacob throughout the play. Even though the play is set in a one-bedroom apartment, it contains a high level of comic physicality, such as Annie chasing Jacob around the room saying “Look at my tits! What do you think of them?” I was impressed with the actor’s commitment to this element of the storytelling and wish them luck for the nights that go on, it just wouldn’t be the same without it. The play largely touched on themes around sexuality and attraction, but at its heart it has some very soft and emotional themes around intimacy, love, and what happens to them over time. Page’s actors presented these complexities perfectly, every one of them giving their all on stage.
Page has written some great jokes — mostly about sex — into this play. All the characters jest with one another about sexual conduct throughout the play. Some will say these kinds of jokes are easy to get laughs off, but sometimes that’s just what you need to contrast with raw emotional depths being presented on stage, even the subtextual ones, in this case. Shout out the stage designer for making the flat number “69”.
If you’re putting on a gay play, I want you to go all the way. I want my identity to be affirmed to hell and back. Mating in Captivity sits on the edges of this but left me wanting for much more. The Bats websites says about the play: “The year’s wildest, wittiest whirlwind of a love battle… Outrageously racy… Sparkling… Gay!” (His Girl Friday, 1940) Well, a bit gay. It’s complicated.” And it was a bit gay. But it felt like the heterosexual’s version of a gay play. Rob’s queer experience was something hidden away in his past, that his partner didn’t know about. The fact one of his exes was a man, rather than all being women, like Annie assumed, caused tension between the two of them. My kind of queer theatre is where we get to live out our queerest dreams on stage. Forget the reality of where we are in society and be free for an evening.
I feel that Mating in Captivity reflected a common and almost banal experience many queer people go through. This is okay though! It stills gets people thinking, laughing together, and all in all addressing their own internal bias. Which, in my opinion, is the best thing you can want from an audience. Plus, the story being presented is a very real one for many people, and I think that’s important to note.
If you drink, I imagine this play would go along nicely with your chosen alcoholic beverage and few a friends — definitely not ideal for a first date. Page knows how to make his jokes hit, and his actors know how to serve them. I would have liked to feel more satisfied at the end, not left with more questions about who wants who, but I think it’s easiest if I put them to bed for myself, and just imagine the romantic queer ending I was after.

K: For better or for worse, yeah.
B: And for starters, when you move to Wellington, that’s exciting — but then it just gets old, more and more everyday. You’re sick of seeing people that you know — especially when you’re at your worst, you’re having a really sad day, you don’t want to see anyone you know. There’s a scene with an ex in the play — and that’s such a Wellington thing — to bump into your ex in town after two years. Wellington’s one of the only places where that’s definitely going to happen, you know?

With Keegan Bragg and Ben Wilson

By Emma Maguire

I sat down with Keegan Bragg and Ben Wilson, the director and the writer of Almost Sober, a new thirteen-person theatre show currently being performed at Club 121 in the CBD. We talked about their show, why theatre shouldn’t just be for theatre people and how Almost Sober is a love letter to Wellington’s nightlife.

E: In your own words, give me a description of your show.

Ben: It’s a big scale show with about thirteen people, and it’s about a night in town — in Wellington’s club scene. A guy’s lost his jacket, a girl who’s going to town for the first time on her eighteenth birthday gets lost, a bunch of yo-pros just complain about their flatmates, and a drug dealer just wants to have a fight.

Keegan: You can have a good night when you go out — have a beer, have some pool, have some dancing, anywhere — in any sort of roughly-sized city in the world. What I really like about Wellington is that you get some really weird nights here. There’s so many different stories, so many different characters — the idea was to cram in as much as we could in a really short amount of time, in about ninety minutes or so.

E: Why do you think students — in particular those who don’t go to theatre very often — should come and see your show?

K: A real focus for us in this play was to be theatrical in a way that would serve the story, and would serve the characters. It’s not really a play that’s trying to be “oh, this is why you’ll love all theatre, all the time” — it’s not like when you go the movies and see a bad movie, you’ll never go to the movies again — but with theatre you do do that, so I think it’s really important that this play is really about the story and really about the characters.

B: The aspect of it is that it’s at a club, not an actual theatre and so I think there’s already a part of that “going to the theatre” stigma that’s been cut down by the fact that we’re putting it in a club — especially a club like 121, which is so student-orientated and so young-person orientated, it’s the brand. My friend Cam [one of the club owners] saw my first play and he was so surprised by it — “there was swearing in that! I didn’t know you could swear in theatre! And you took drugs on stage — I didn’t know you could do that in theatre.” It was just so interesting to me that he had this Shakespearean idea of what theatre had to be.

E: So, you were commissioned to write this play?

B: Sort of. I talked to Cam when I was, y’know, under the influence at his club and I pitched it to him — the idea of putting a show on. It was about a month, just me writing everyday, and it ended up at 95 pages. When you have thirteen characters, 95 pages is a good amount.

E: With thirteen characters I presume you have quite a diverse cast. Do you think that any theatre-goer can come in and see at least part of themselves in one of your characters?

B: I hope so. That was a huge thing when I started and when I was talking with Keegan about it — everyone needs to feel like there’s something there. There’s a character that’s eighteen, and it’s her first time in town, and then there’s people who are like 26-27, who’ve been in the city for a very long time. I think it’s very Wellington-specific, especially the characters. They’re characters that are very much of this city’s ilk — they’re so formed by what this city is like. The city can feel huge and can feel small — it can feel isolating, like a small fish in a big pond sometimes. All of that is in there.

K: I remember when I moved here, when I moved into halls of residences for the first time here — I remember thinking that my whole life was now in this little room — but then you get older and you get more friends and you get more of a life here — I think this city begins to feel smaller, there are less mysteries in this city. It’s quite a small city, at the end of the day. It’s not as big as Auckland, and Auckland’s not as big as cities overseas. Your life gets more complex and you start to think that maybe the city’s starting to die a little bit, or maybe that you were here ten years too late because you’ve heard about all the good old times from people who were older than you. I think there’s something in that that is really present as a through-line in the play.

B: There’s a whole thing in the play about being connected — everyone knows everybody. That’s such a big part about living in Wellington, everyday you’ll see someone that you know, or someone that you know through somebody else —

K: For better or for worse, yeah.

B: And for starters, when you move to Wellington, that’s exciting — but then it just gets old, more and more everyday. You’re sick of seeing people that you know — especially when you’re at your worst, you’re having a really sad day, you don’t want to see anyone you know. There’s a scene with an ex in the play — and that’s such a Wellington thing — to bump into your ex in town after two years.

Wellington’s one of the only places where that’s definitely going to happen, you know?

Almost Sober is being performed at Club 121 until the 4th of August, 2018. Tickets available from tickettailor.

From Picasso and Van Gogh to Weinstein and co, Nanette dissects a festering nexus of societal water cooler talk. That is to say, it brings conversational threads about the abuse of storied power through history, the dangerousness of being different, and the misunderstanding of mental illness in one prevailing voice.
Hannah Gadsby has used her role as a great stand up to ferociously skewer so many of her audience (this author included) with polished barbs of a lived experience that is told in such a powerful way, that to try and squirm away from her insight just makes it that more poignant.
The last third of Gadsby’s show is relentless and is simply Must. Watch. Television. It’s almost difficult to overstate how good Nanette actually is. Just go and watch it. Seriously. Stop wasting her time.

The live music on the side supported the action on stage and either had you laughing or on the edge of tears. Large lighting screens showed active silhouettes of the past, and real leaves scattered around the stage gave off the most wonderful crunch and smell whenever an actor stepped on them.
Taking an old Māori tale and setting it in 2018 was a powerful demonstration of how so much meaning has been lost due to colonisation. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing these young Māori women tell their own stories of whakapapa. I believe strongly in the importance of minorities having access to spaces to tell their own stories.
These three are a strong team and I hope they get to present this piece to more audiences as time goes on. I want to see more from young people in the New Zealand theatre scene. Shakespeare can move over for the next 500 years, it’s time for our stories to be heard.

I want to be clear; I’m not trying to have a go at anyone here, or be a provocateur for the sake of it. I just feel in a climate where the entertainment industry (and I believe stand up comedy has its place here) is striving so hard to be diverse and to tell the stories of the marginalised, to be a white middle class male comic and to not address the fact that you are, is to presume that your story is still the dominant one.

If there was an underlying theme that runs throughout the show, it would be that of Kingsford’s relationship to technology. He lamented that it’s slowly divorcing him from the rest of reality, all the while trying to find common ground with the audience by appealing to the technoholic in them. This, in my opinion, is a fine theme to base a show around, however Kingsford never gave the audience their due, even as he tried to forge this connection with them. Jokes about video games being all about “mushrooms and killing people” felt and fell flat because the audience didn’t buy the simplification. I want to think that this is intentional and that Kingsford just isn’t prepared to take a big swing just yet, not comfortable sharing honest opinions without dumbing them down for an audience.

The show had a disjointed feeling. It seemed as though Kingsford was still trying to figure himself out as a stand up, and he wasn’t yet willing to engage with the sensibilities of the young millennial crowd that make up his target audience. I don’t necessarily think the show was bad, just that there was a lot of room for improvement.

The play opens on Mama burying her cat, Blackie. Throughout the forty-five minute play, we see Mama doing laundry, and eventually talking to Moa the chicken as well, revealing some dark secrets she’s kept for over fifty years. Mama talks frequently to the vegetables in her garden – her pumpkin will make a nice pie for her granddaughter, her spinach will make her grandsons strong – showing her pride and care for food and family.

The play surrounded itself with themes of family, love, and loss but I felt these could have been driven home more. Furthermore, the role of the audience was never really defined. Shakespeare, for example, always included the audience, characters speaking directly to them during their soliloquies (and other dialogue). As a result of not having a defined audience, there was no flow of conversation, and I was constantly taken out of the world of the play, being reminded that I was in a theatre, watching a show. It would have made more dramaturgical sense to cast the audience as Barbara, Mama’s nosy neighbour, through lighting cues, seeing as the audience is indeed listening into Mama’s life and thoughts. However, the lighting was not sharp and presented a missed opportunity.

Just as Hamlet speaks to Yorick, Mama speaks to Blackie and Moa. However, since Moa is her own character (as demonstrated by the way Fa’avae-Jackson was not dressed in theatre-camouflaging black) yet speechless, it doesn’t entirely allow for the emotional openness the audience yearns for, because Mama is preoccupied with the chicken and not herself. At one moment, Mama walks onstage in tears and spends a good few minutes crying before wiping her tears to focus on Moa – a missed opportunity for emotional truth.
If the show engaged more with the audience, maybe Mama’s emotional reveals would have felt more natural and pulled my heartstrings more. This directorship by actor Fasitua Amosa makes for a light but ultimately forgetful show.
Still Life with Chickens runs until 2 June. Tickets are available at circa.co.nz.