“Hey!
Just dropping you an email to say hi! Sorry to miss you this morning. Had an appointment clash. This office can be super confusing, feel free to hit me up if there’s anything you need clarified.
Hope to see you in person soon.”

“Hey there,
Thanks for the note! Everybody here seems so nice. Big change from my last job. Will definitely hit you up if there’s anything I need clarified, it seems fairly straightforward so far.
Hope to meet you soon too.”

This is the teaser for From Another Woman, Smoke Labours Productions outstanding work for Auckland Pride 2025.

It’s been a somewhat odd Auckland Pride in 2025 with plenty of community happenings but not much theatre. Not a criticism, merely an observation.

Most of the publicity surrounding the festival has been generated by Destiny Church and its relentless and often brutal attacks on the rainbow community, alongside the failure of those whose job it is to keep us safe to actually do so. It’s hard to believe that, in the words of the iconic protest sign from the ‘70s, ‘we still have to protest this shit’.

In February alone, Destiny Church, with the blessing of their leader, engaged in an unconscionable attack on a rainbow kids show and its audience at the Te Atatu Library, a ludicrous attempt by a few misguided Destiny youths to disrupt the annual Rainbow Parade with an ill-conceived and shabbily performed haka as it passed down Ponsonby Road, and, at least in part, causing the cancellation of the scheduled Trans Pride Drag Show due to an inability on the part of the organisers and the police to ensure the safety of all concerned even though the venue is in the centre of the city. While I fully accept this decision what does it say about NZ Police’s commitment to ensuring there are safe spaces for the rainbow community to meet and celebrate. We should never be giving in to bullying and threats by violent and ignorant thugs even if it is done in the mistaken belief that, somehow, God has authorised it and told them to get right to it.

I’ve managed to catch some great shows:  If These Wigs Could Talk, Pretty Legal, Hugo’s Rainbow Show, and now From Another Woman. Each was a work of quality, and each fully justified its place in the festival programme.

From Another Woman is on at the Basement until Saturday and if opening night is anything to go by it will sell out and so it should. It’s a stunning piece of work.

The Basement is alive with chatter, not unusual in this space. The crowd floods into the main house from the bar, most at the last minute, and the excitement is electric. Suddenly there’s absolute silence. A figure enters from the left, stands still. She’s wearing black trousers, black boots, and a gorgeous lightweight teal top. She moves to centre stage and starts the narrative. Since this is a solo show, I work out quickly that this is Renaye Tamati. She’s immediately impressive, owns the space, does so for the next 60 minutes. But I get ahead of myself.

From Another Woman is the latest in a long line of plays that have flowed from the pen – do we still say that? – issued from the prolific keyboard of multiple-award winning playwright and journalist Sam Brooks. You might remember Actressexual, Burn Her (which won the Auckland Theatre Excellence Award for Outstanding Production), Jacinda (commissioned for the 2018 Actors’ Programme graduation show), Queen, Riding in Cars With (Mostly Straight) Boys, and The Perfect Image (which was selected for Auckland Pride’s Pride Elevates programme in 2024). If you don’t remember any of these there are certainly plenty more. Check out Theatreview, they’re all there. I’ve seen most of them, reviewed a few, consider Brooks to be among the best playwrights in the land, so my excitement level is right up there,

I like all of his writing but it’s his plays that really hit my sweet spot. They’re constructed beautifully for both performance and presentation, incredibly easy to speak and listen to, his characters are crafted with nuance and subtlety, and his plots are credible and rich in surprises. From Another Woman is exactly like this.

We enter the theatre before the rush. The wide stage has hundreds of pieces of screwed up paper spread across the stage like snow drifts. In the centre of these there is a plain wooden chair. From the lighting grid hang strips of paper recovered from receipt printing machines.

The promotional material tells us that ‘this new experimental show from award-winning playwright Sam Brooks that follows an office romance as it builds from absolutely nothing into an unfortunate something. From Another Woman is one part meet cute and one part mystery. What is this pair doing on their Tuesday afternoon coffee dates? What is the difference behind a “cheers” and a “cheers x”? What do the espresso martini orders on that lunch receipt actually mean? This play pulls back the veil to reveal the truth behind this relationship told entirely through the mundanities of the 9-5 working grind: Emails, memos, receipts.’

What the marketing doesn’t tell us is that this is ‘one of those productions’, one of those special evenings at the theatre where the play and the actor – that’s Brook (playwright and director) and actor Renaye Tamati – work so well together that they seem inseparable. Often, it’s the kiss of death for a writer to direct their own work but Brooks has turned it into an art form. Not once, in my experience of his work, has he failed to produce a deeply satisfying experience without any of those blips and glitches where the audience notes something obvious that the director has missed that’s clearly obvious to everyone else. From Another Woman is seamless in its writing, its direction, and Tamati’s performance with all the interfaces completely invisible. The result is we live in the narrative as though it’s happening directly to us, and we experience all the emotions spawned by the terrific twins. Acting at its very best.

Renaye Tamati is outstanding, at one with her material and fully embedded in her characters. Brooks and Tamati have worked together before, on Tamati’s Actor’s Program graduation show Jacinda in 2018. Tamati’s since worked consistently building impressive screen credits via Deep Water, Vince, Camp Be Better, The Brokenwood Mysteries and The Gone. On stage, she is best known for Titania/Hippolyta in the Pop-Up Globe’s Māori-language adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

A sort of Renaissance woman.

Tamati plays Jo, and her married work colleague Chris, and the supervisor of the business they both work for. Each character is clearly delineated and, while this is the story of an ill-fated office romance, it’s also a comic masterpiece.  Tamati has the exquisite gift of comic timing which she uses shamelessly to open us up before serving Chris up on a plate and delivering a perfectly placed coup de grâce.

To us.

Engaging with Tamati’s exquisite performance has me privately owning up to having played each of these characters in my own life, the office Lothario who cheats on everyone, the gullible young woman who walks into a daytime nightmare with her eyes wide open, and the shallow manager full of glib quips and not a skerrick of empathy.

Yep, that’s me, Shallow Hal, but with the necessary lessons learned a long time ago.

In 1971 I walked out of a movie theatre in Taumarunui so angry I wanted to scream and punch things. The movie I’d just seen was Easy Rider. As I left the Basement on Thursday evening, I felt echoes of Easy Rider only this time it was Lothario Chris I wanted to shout at. What an absolute a-hole, and what a fabulous performance.

A real tour de force.

The office romance story is hardly new (sadly) but the package is (receipts, texts, emails), the writing is utterly beguiling, and the delivery is unique in both its quality and its exquisite economy.

What a fantastic experience, and it’s on at the Basement at 8pm until 01 March.

Recommended.

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