 reviewed by Anna Chinn (New Zealand Listener) 3 Oct 2009 |
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Talking fast, laughing loud New Zealand theatre is big enough and mature enough to look after itself these days, so WOW! Productions – a company that helped nurse it through its adolescence – has decided to take us on a creative vacation to 1930s America. [more] |
 reviewed by Frances Edmond (New Zealand Listener) 7 Apr 2008 |
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Rabbiting on Nina Raine’s play rambles to an undramatic halt. [more] |
 reviewed by Frances Edmond (New Zealand Listener) 12 May 2008 |
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Walking the tightrope of farce “The feminist bequest: dead mothers” – one of the many pithy, witty lines from Joanna Murray-Smith’s play The Female of the Species. Based on an incident in Germaine Greer’s life, one might have expected it to involve an investigation of feminist polemics, some analysis of social engineering. It doesn’t. [more] |
 reviewed by Frances Edmond (New Zealand Listener) 9 Aug 2008 |
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Caged Sisters The Birdcage, a bar in a glass-ceilinged conservatory, is the venue for the latest production by the Peripeteia Players: Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. It’s the story of the disappointed dreams of the Prozorov family – Olga (Laurel Devenie), Masha (Madeleine Hyland), Irena (Brooke Williams) and their brother, Andrey (Marek Sumich) – and their struggle to find meaning as they try to come to terms with the decay of the privileged world they have grown up in ... [more] |
 reviewed by Frances Edmond (New Zealand Listener) 1 Nov 2008 |
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That’s entertainment Show business – the business of celebrity – is the subject of Douglas Carter Beane’s wickedly funny deconstruction of the movie business. Diane (Alison Bruce), elegant and as sharp as a cut-throat razor, is determined to achieve stardom for her client, actor Mitchell Green (Paolo Rotondo) … And in true movie style, the question becomes, will he get the girl … or the boy … or both … or neither? And at what price? [more] |
 reviewed by Frances Edmond (New Zealand Listener) 19 Aug 2009 |
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Love in the time of Aids Holding the Man is the stage adaptation of Timothy Conigrave’s book of the same name: a memoir of growing up gay (and Catholic) in 1970s Melbourne, and an evocation of the tragedy that was the devastating Aids epidemic of the 80s. [more] |
 reviewed by Frances Edmond (New Zealand Listener) 19 Sep 2009 |
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Deep roots It is surprising, and indicative of a serious omission, that Auckland Theatre Company’s revival of Bruce Mason’s groundbreaking The Pohutukawa Tree is the play’s first-ever fully professional production staged in Auckland. Written in 1955, when the assumption was that we were a peaceful integrated society and Maori were “happy natives”, the play peels back the easy surfaces to explore the fraught and complex reality of New Zealand’s race relations. [more] |
 reviewed by Frances Edmond (New Zealand Listener) 28 Nov 2009 |
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Shooting high Flintlock Musket is the second play by Kirk Torrance, Outrageous Fortune actor and winner of a Chapman Tripp outstanding new playwright award for his 2003 debut, Strata. Set in the 1800s, before the musket wars, his new play explores early Maori/Pakeha contact, telling a tale of envy, ambition, bloodshed and revenge. Underpinned by themes and motifs from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, it is ambitious in concept and scale. Colliding versions of reality shed light on the differing Maori and Pakeha attitudes to mana, to possessions (land and people) and, by implication, to the meaning of our shared history and its place in our respective memories. [more] |
 reviewed by Hap Richardson 17 Apr 2008 |
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Doubled over at dark humour The opening scene sets the tone for the piece. Liz a social outcast is about to jump to her death. She hears a Greek chorus of students below, yelling something: “Jump Jump Jump …” A teacher interrupts the group. Perhaps he will be her saviour. He joins the chorus: “Jump Jump Jump …” [more] |
 reviewed by Hap Richardson 24 Jul 2008 |
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The poetry of hardship The cast of characters in Donna Banicevich Gera's play Land Without Sundays feel so authentic, so convincingly three dimensional, that you could be forgiven for thinking that you walked into West Auckland vineyard in the 1930s. The star of this play is the words ... [more] |
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