TAHI Festival’s HATCH showcase returns for another season and another taste of what’s on the minds of up-and-coming theatre-makers and performers. HATCH gives us a variety show-style lineup of six short pieces, each clocking in at around ten minutes, created by students from Te Herenga Waka, Te Auaha and Toi Whakaari. The idea is that with mentorship and support from TAHI, these students will find links between the creative approaches that typify their ‘home’ institution and the work of other emerging artists.

Running order is a deeply important choice in group programmes like these, and the 2025 season is presented in a way that flows nicely from segment to segment. The show is called a ‘polylogue’ for good reason: coincidental themes emerge and inform subsequent performances. This HATCH season is very high-energy, grounded in emotional exploration rather than being explicitly cerebral or political. One gets a sense that the writer-performers have interacted, learned from each other and bounced ideas around – there is a lot of aroha in the room and a lot of warm open-mindedness from the audience, which is lovely to see.

There is no opening karakia or foreword from the Director this year. Instead, Aroha Morrison starts the show with a repeated knock at the theatre doors of BATS’ Dome space. They are strong, physical and firmly grounded in their naïve ‘beginner’s mind’ as they present Enter: Child. Morrison offers us some very good clowning, the kind that leans heavily into audience participation and getting into uncomfortable spaces without overstaying its welcome.

Morrison is brilliant at warming up a crowd on a chilly Wellington evening and soon has us flailing our arms around like puppets at their beck and call. They are unafraid to embrace the more disruptive aspects of their wide-eyed character, including throwing childish tantrums, barging in and out of traditionally delineated theatre spaces and literally chewing on the scenery. Child feels like a much-needed modern interpretation of old-school clowning approaches.

Hāngī Pants, the next segment on the bill, feels like a wild diversion from childishness into knowing worldliness at first – but only at first. Waikamania Seve puts something more interesting than her Id front and centre for what feels at first like a straightforward and breathless confessional monologue. Her narrating character has an inner child who seeks to self-soothe even as she tries very hard to act like an adult. The interleaved moments of video-projected, oversaturated colour and fraught dance breaks show us her inner conflict.

Seve wrestles with herself even as she strives to make a point of ‘unpacking’ her sexual traumas and triumphs without giving in to shame. There’s something deep and interesting here – aromantic, unapologetic sexuality is a topic that often becomes undermined by moralising or lazy storytelling, but Seve tells a bold, good story with enough nuance to make it more grounded than shocking. She could easily build this piece out into a full-length show.

The third of our inner children bursts forth from repression at the click of a pen – and with some grisly sound effects and timely lighting-state changes. Cursed Child: The return of Mr Haki is a two-header delivered by one actor. Leia Edmonds plays a rather buttoned-up ‘grown-up’, confronting the imaginary friend who they may or may not have murdered using the power of their five-year-old imagination. The back-and-forth and accompanying physical comedy is nicely timed, the writing goes to a few unexpected places and delivers spontaneous big laughs from the audience. There’s even a nifty moment of prop comedy.

It’s nostalgic, sweet and if there were more than ten minutes on the clock, it would be interesting to explore the ‘adult’ character, flesh the imaginary friend out a little more and get a more rounded picture of what this double character was like as a potentially murderous five-year-old kid.

With no break (unlike in previous years) we roll straight into the next segment, Lost Memory, delivered monologue-style by George Long. This piece evokes not childhood but the hazy, lost years of one’s early dating life; a world where the thrill of a meet-cute or the obsessive quest for romantic validation linger in the mind, but the specific details of one’s beloved become concerningly hazy with time and repetition.

Long’s initial braggadocio and exaggerated physicality soon break down, and flickers of sincerity begin to show through the gaps in his trope-heavy narrative. All that is left at the end of the narrator’s breakneck breakdown is a heavy self-imposed sense of shame, the desire to make someone smile and an abject failure to integrate the object of that desire into the character’s inner world. With some polish, Lost Memory could turn into a Beckett-ish exercise in self-examination that either goes nowhere, or somewhere; whichever Long prefers.

The Ring does two things at the same time: Charlie Roigard throws impressive energy, charisma and passion into his turn in the ring as a ‘sports entertainer’ character, and he offers some deeper commentary on both the sport and more universal life truths. He has a great deal of sincerity to offer in the guise of a ringside speech. Given the one-person nature of HATCH, wrestling with oneself does have a tendency to come off as parodic and Roigard writes in his programme notes that he did want to play up the parody aspect of pro-wrestling theatrics.

That is a valid way to play the scene, but it does place Roigard in a self-inflicted pin-fall by undermining his more serious – and arguably more interesting – personal message. It would be fascinating to see him play it straight. One could imagine a longer version of The Ring as an hour-long play with two actors, perhaps with an actual Kiwi pro wrestler sitting in the other chair, living out the less glamorous aspects of the profession with Roigard in character as their collaborator.

Lastly we have the delightfully titled Warm Night At Normal School, created and performed by Gabriel Murphy. Fans of the Adrian Edmondson school of cringe-based character comedy will detect traces of that DNA in Murphy’s mannerisms and monologue style, but he brings a dubious charm that is all his own. His portrait of a barely-pubescent boy crashing out at a school dance is somehow spot-on without roasting any one specific teenager.

There is a sense that we all know someone like this, a person who exudes a kind of miasma that makes them a social disaster magnet, and Murphy never once shies away from the full-frontal awkwardness of portraying That One Person. It’s an incredibly captivating sight, even as it has the audience in stitches. Murphy’s body language is impeccably outrageous, his timing and use of vocal tics is splendid and despite the all-pervasive ick, his character manages to stay quite likeable. It’s a nifty script that could make an interesting cornerstone for a skit-based show, and an excellent way to wrap up the bill.

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