The first thing you should know is that this isn’t a show you watch. It’s a show you submit to and eventually find yourself laughing through, possibly against your better judgment. It’s R18 for a reason. There is nudity. There is strobe lighting. There is a full recreation of the Ghost pottery scene using a very very large, very thematically important dildo. And still, somehow, Unchained Melody plays and reminds you that it remains one of the swooniest bangers ever written, even when you’re watching something you’ll never be able to unsee.

A Nightime Travesty, presented by A Daylight Connection and Brink Productions, has landed in Aotearoa for the first time as part of the Kia Mau Festival’s He Ngaru Nui programme. And ‘landed’ might not be the exact right word. It crashes, blasts and smears its way across the stage of the Hannah Playhouse theatre with the confidence of something that knows exactly how unhinged it is and dares you to look away.

The premise: Earth is dead. The last plane out is full of mess. Two flight attendants, one pregnant another possibly a robot, are trying to hold it together while everything, and everyone, unravels. There’s a pilot with divine thumbs, a puppet that does things no puppet should, and a backdrop of collapsing moral structures dressed up as airline protocol.

[Image-credit: GregoryLorenzutti]

Co-creators and lead performers Kamarra Bell-Wykes and Carly Sheppard are relentlessly good. Their timing is surgical. They move between mockery and sincerity without warning. Sheppard plays Angel, the last Aboriginal person left and a flight attendant on the doomed flight, as well as a range of other figures including a hyper-sexualised variety show eye-candy and an eerie, witch-like chorus figure. Her performance is emotionally elastic, veering from deep vulnerability to sharp absurdity.

Bell-Wykes, meanwhile, plays Alexa (yes, like the voice assistant), a fellow flight attendant and God’s Gift, the egomaniacal pilot of the ship, alongside her own witch-like character. There’s a section where she cycles through all three personas in rapid succession, wearing the same costume and wig, and yet somehow making each shift unmistakably clear just through posture and presence. It’s a masterclass in embodiment.

Zach Blampied adds to the absurdity with a presence that’s somehow both precise and outrageous. All the performers move through their characters with clarity and control, holding the line between comedy and discomfort with expert timing.

The form is vaudeville, which makes sense. The show borrows from a kind of nostalgia, long-running variety shows, Aussie larrikin humour, television jingles – but only to unravel it from the inside. Nothing sacred is safe. The writing is smart, tight and unforgiving. One joke rolls into the next. The pace doesn’t let up. And beneath the costume changes and chaos, there’s a question about who gets left behind when the world moves on. Or burns.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, there’s a very real fear: that culture can’t survive dislocation; that without land, elders or ceremony, memory might not be enough. The show doesn’t offer an answer. It just lets the question sit there, awkward and unresolved, like a passenger no one wants to sit next to.

The direction by Stephen Nicolazzo keeps everything balanced on the edge of collapse. That is exactly where it needs to be. The sound design by Smallsound and Matthew Pana isn’t just background. It’s how the show breathes. The lighting (designed by Gina Gascoigne) pushes us between spectacle and shadow in ways that keep the audience unsure of where the stage ends and the fallout begins.

There is absurdity everywhere, a show so committed it makes you question reality. Jokes that land so fast and hard you miss the next one because you’re still gasping. But underneath that chaos is a very old grief.

This is a show about exile. About being removed from the land, the self, the story. Edward Said wrote about exile as “strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience.” This is what A Nightime Travesty does so well, it lets you laugh at the terribleness, until you realise it isn’t funny at all.

By the end, the cast returns not for bows, but for a dedication: to Indigenous resistance; to global solidarity; to a free Palestine. It’s not just a gesture. It’s a line being drawn. This is work that knows where it comes from and who it is standing with.

A Nightime Travesty is difficult to describe without sounding like you’re making it up. It’s grotesque and funny and at times disorienting. It is also painfully smart. And underneath it all, it’s holding something sharp and unresolved about what it means to lose the world and when everyone is trying to build something ‘better’ in its place.

Go see it. Even if you’re squeamish about sex, examining Christianity, or seeing a puppet in compromising positions, this is still for you. Because this is theatre that risks everything to say something loud and messy and true.

Just don’t expect to walk out the same way you walked in.

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