 WHO WANTS TO BE 100? (ANYONE WHO’S 99) at Circa One reviewed by John Smythe 3 Mar 2008 |
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Funny, insightful and finally moving I’ve given up waiting for Roger Hall to get back to writing another play that sustains the unities of time, place and action without resorting to direct address to introduce his characters. The fact is he has made an art form of getting characters to tell their back-stories in expositional monologues that entertain, in after-dinner speaker style. And it works: long season with full houses of happy customer attest to that. [more] |
 BRO’ TOWN LIVE ON STAGE at St James Theatre reviewed by John Smythe 5 Mar 2008 |
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Informative and entertaining celebration of success and celebrity The story goes that back in 1996 Oscar Kightley and Dave Fane checked out a Samoan comedy show at the Laugh Festival and told each other, “We could do that.” Twelve years later ... having checked out Nancy (voice of Bart Simpson) Cartwright’s one woman show My Life as a 10-Year-Old Boy, they said it again: “We could do that.” And after a fashion, they have. [more] |
 THE DENTIST'S CHAIR at Soundings - Te Papa reviewed by John Smythe 7 Mar 2008 |
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Applaudable vision and values Fear and love are the primary emotions. A great deal of personal and political action is provoked by fear and carried out in the name of – or in the quest for – ‘love’. Indeed the desire to earn the ‘love’ of ‘God’ drives countless acts of terrorism and the consequent ‘War on Terror’. And we all have own little wars on terror, epitomised by such universal fears as going to the dentist – a.k.a. ‘the murder house’. Hence The Dentist’s Chair: big themes contained in the lives, loves and fears of those who inhabit the humdrum dental surgery of Albert Southwick, whose unrelated namesake invented the electric chair. [more] |
 WHERE WE ONCE BELONGED at Downstage Theatre reviewed by John Smythe 10 Mar 2008 |
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Challenging values with spirit and humour Margaret Mead popularised the topic with Coming of Age in Samoa, but Sia Figiel’s Where We Once Belonged ... paints a very different picture. It lifts the idyllic Pacific Paradise palm frond to expose something quite other, with all the intensity and humour of a bourgeoning adolescent awareness. [more] |
 CHILDREN'S CHEERING CARPET at Te Papa, level 2 reviewed by John Smythe 11 Mar 2008 |
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A shared experience Generating a quality of mystique can gild an otherwise ordinary lily or enhance the magic of a theatrical experience. In the case of the Children’s Cheering Carpet, from Italy’s Compagnia TPO, I think the latter applies. [more] |
 TRACES at Opera House reviewed by John Smythe 12 Mar 2008 |
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Thoroughly entertaining excellence with heart The idea is that the end of the world is nigh. Cheerful lot, Les 7 Doigts de la Main. In La Vie, the company’s other show at this fest, everyone is already dead ... But Traces has much more urgency to it. Performed by five multi-skilled performers in their mid-20s, they ... play hard, burning off all their energy while it still has value, in the hope (as I see it) that their extraordinary actions will leave traces in the spaces left behind. [more] |
 HONOUR BOUND at TSB Bank Arena, Queens Wharf reviewed by John Smythe 14 Mar 2008 |
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Potent theatre of indictment: not to be missed or dismissed “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” is the motto of the Joint Task Force charged with running the Guantánamo detention centre. But here we find honour bound, black-hooded and consigned to a very dark place while detainees (the Bush administration has decreed they are not prisoners of war and therefore not protected by the Geneva Convention) are subjected to regimes of systematic torture, sanctioned by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to win their co-operation and extract supposedly credible ‘information’ and evidence’. Yeah right. [more] |
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NZ International Arts Festival THE DRAGON'S TRILOGY at The Events Centre reviewed by Laurie Atkinson (The Dominion Post) 13 Mar 2006 |
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Miracles of invention Lepage and his company take a leisurely four hours of stage time to tell this novel-like family saga that covers 75 years of the friendship between two Quebecois cousins, Jeanne and Francoise. Jeanne’s life is marked by tragedy: a love affair ruined by her alcoholic father, an unfortunate marriage to a Chinese man, a physically and mentally disabled daughter. [more] See also reviews by: John Smythe (John Smythe: Theatre Reviews); Lynn Freeman (Capital Times); Matthew Wagner (Not published in Sunday Star Times); |
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NZ International Arts Festival PAGE 8 at Downstage Theatre reviewed by Laurie Atkinson (The Dominion Post) 9 Mar 2006 |
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Moving, funny and theatrical Page 8 is, as the performer’s brother and director states, a love letter to David Page’s family. Families are often seen, as Oscar Wilde once said, as terrible encumbrances, especially when one is not married. Not so for David Page whose family is his bedrock. [more] See also reviews by: John Smythe (John Smythe: Theatre Reviews); Lynn Freeman (Capital Times); |
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NZ International Arts Festival BATTALION at Hosanna Fellowship Hall, Cannon's Creek reviewed by Laurie Atkinson (The Dominion Post) 8 Mar 2006 |
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Tales of tenacity simply told This simply told story of five young men who escape their one-cow town for adventure, or, as one of them says, to meet a girl he isn't related to, and join the 28th Maori Battalion to fight the Germans is told in recollection by one of the survivors, Paora Metene (Maaka Pohatu), while today as an old man he is trying to cope with two rebellious teenage sisters, one of whom is named, though she isn't aware of it, after a battlefield where her great-grandfather fought and died. [more] See also reviews by: John Smythe (John Smythe: theatre reviews); |
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