Director Matías Avaca uses the cosy, convenient metaphor of a warm fire to gather a group of improvisors for shared storytelling and family-focused scene painting. Incidental players stand along the darkened walls of BATS Stage, waiting for the storytellers to step forward from their shared conviviality and share something from the imagination. They are living props, prompts, odd voices in the heads of five grown-ups who are still half-buried in the worlds of their childhood.

Bonfire is the public-facing performance created from one of the Festival’s workshops, ‘The Stories That Made Us’ – an appropriate theme considering the show delves into personal histories and the ways we can misinterpret, misremember or reimagine them. The show’s set is simple but highly effective, with its warm electric fire nested in driftwood, low intimate lighting and gentle incidental music that reflects emotional nuance without intruding on the storytelling.

The fireside characters maintain bonds of differing degree: two pairs of cousins, former schoolyard friends – people who know and like each other but who didn’t all grow up in the same circumstances. The varying strength of their connections means that there is more room for differences of opinion, probing questions and teasing jokes than in many improv shows. Instead of accepting and reinforcing a suggested idea or a prompt thrown out in haste, the longer show format lets characters (or mischievous actors) double back and dig more out of the inconsistencies, turning them into character traits or using them to move the story forward.

Avaca bills this performance as a vehicle for ancestral stories: perhaps because Pākehā oral histories tend not to extend back further than a couple of generations or perhaps because childhood is such a rich vein of material for stories, we don’t see a deep multigenerational narrative in this particular incarnation of the show. What’s there is interesting, interconnected and sweetly bizarre in a way that strongly evokes the confusing feelings and vivid mental life of children.

There is plenty of room for the characters to bring out their deeply eccentric pasts and, in the safe space of the bonfire, to share their awkward secrets among accepting friends. The performers are unafraid to go to strange places and admit that their child selves are chaotic – full of intense impulses, feeling sensations vividly.

We see a lot of dream imagery and dream-language. Stories are often rooted in primal fears, evoking chaotic family dynamics that only really need to be hinted at. Parents and older family members remain strangers to the audience; at times, the adult characters themselves seem to struggle with understanding their own families, treating them more like friendly cryptids than real people. We get glimpses into messy grown-up situations through the unreliable lens of the child’s perspective, and that interpretation is a lot more intriguing than a straightforward therapy-style confession. The surreal elements also permit the audience to laugh and commiserate with the actors as they find their way to the heart of each story.

The central thread of the interactions around the campfire links all the different storytelling segments and grounds the more fantastical elements back in a more realised, practical space. The bonfire interludes feel like a tiny debriefing session after each lucid dream or wild tale. Some of the characters develop very small arcs over the show: the players shuffle around and bond with or distance themselves from other characters as time passes. People’s mindsets shift gradually, in a way that is realistic – it would be odd if everyone were to experience a life-changing revelation in the short space of an hour.

What the characters can do is recontextualise their own inner worlds based on the secrets they have just heard. It’s a very effective device to demonstrate subtle character development, one that would be great to see used more often in improvised theatre. 

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