Hexaflexagon 2025

BATS Theatre, The Dome, 1 Kent Tce, Wellington

27/09/2025 - 27/09/2025

Production Details


Directed by Jim Fishwick

New Zealand Improv Fest


A hexaflexagon is a brightly-coloured six-sided shape that folds in on and out of itself to reveal face upon face upon face.

This show is also a hexaflexagon.

Six brightly-coloured shape-shifting actors fold scenes in on and out of themselves to reveal face upon face upon face. We wear lip gloss and carry a sword and play Super Mario and explore the forest and cry wet tears and eat giant pink-frosted donuts and party until dawn. We’re hexaflexagons. And so are you.

HEXAFLEXAGON is a high-art, high-energy improv show drenched in neon colours and backed by a hyperpop soundtrack. Six actors improvise scenes that are simultaneously very silly and very earnest, angular and amorphous, which weave together and snap apart.

BATS Theatre, The Dome
27 September 2025 
7pm
$16-$40
https://bats.co.nz/whats-on/hexaflexagon/


Jim Fishwick (they/them)
Liz Butler (they/she)
Stevie Hancox-Monk (they/them)
Christine Brooks (CB) (they/them)
Lia Kelly (she/her)
Megan Connolly (they/them)

Musos: Isaac Hooper (he/they), Lia Kelly (she/her)
Operator: Jaklene Vukasinovic (she/they)


Theatre , Improv ,


55 mins

Embodies the right to exist, create and play without restraint

Review by Laura Vera Constan 28th Sep 2025

A hexaflexagon is a brightly coloured six-sided shape that folds in on and out of itself to reveal face upon face upon face. This show is also a hexaflexagon. We are hexaflexagons. And so are you.

Think the Kit Kat Klub in the 1940s saying fuck you to repression, then turn the volume and the colour all the way up. Tachan! Sit tight for a ride as Hexaflexagon messes you up. Kaleidoscopic, eclectic and sometimes sensory overloaded, it plunges the audience into an Imaginarium of possibilities. Jim Fishwick, the director, reassures us right from the beginning: “Things might get weird. Stay here. You are safe.” That safety net lets the audience surrender to the ride.

The lights fade dramatically, pulling us into a dreamland of shifting pinks and blues, while a hyperpop soundtrack pushes the energy forward, at times strident, always impossible to ignore (Operator: Jaklene Vukasinovic). At first, my training in classical theatre makes me resist; I cling to structure and form. But eventually, what emerges is a perfectly constructed Imaginarium where chaos has its own logic and the resistance gives way to delight.

The set design frames the energy so well: a musician and DJ in a funky silver suit (Lia Kelly and Isaac Hooper) compose together, while Jim occasionally steps inside the scenes to shape them from within. Eight stories unfold across six actors, using different techniques: rewinding, repetition, and layering.

The cast – Liz Butler, Stevie Hancox-Monk, Christine Brooks, Megan Connolly and Lia Kelly – excels at call backs, building running gags into emotional echoes. At times, it feels like a living chorus, part conceptual, part esperpéntico (the grotesque), as actors mirror one another like amoebas, shifting, flowing and composing the world together. Their performances move between the fluid and the angular, creating surprising textures that seem to weave an entire universe in real time.

It feels like stepping inside a neon-charged pinball machine of improvisation: fast, inventive and unapologetically larger than life. Highlights are plentiful: a frenetic running scene, children tracing shapes on rain-fogged windows which evolve into drawing smiles on each other’s faces, a reminder about “pretending to say yes to things,” and a second puberty. It is all enormous and absurd, like Beckett reimagined through neon. At one point, I feel as though I am under the sea, immersed in the unfamiliar.

A final appearance from the director closes the night, clarifying the show’s vision and making everything fall into place. Jim explains that the cast is transgender and that the work imagines a world where anything is possible and everyone is welcome.

Hexaflexagon is an immersive celebration of freedom, carving out a space where repression has no place and where identities and possibilities expand without limit. Remarkable for its inventiveness and artistry, it embodies the right to exist, to create and to play without restraint.

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