There’s something inherently dramatic about an Uber ride—the hesitant “Hi there, are you here for…?”6, the uneasy intimacy of sharing confined space, the pieces of yourself surrendered to awkward silence, and the ever-cathartic drop-off. Winner of the Most Innovative Piece award at the 2025 NZ Fringe Festival, Roadkill: An Uber Cool Musical takes this everyday experience and transforms it into something theatrical, ridiculous, and deeply entertaining. Conversations with the driver veer between the deeply personal and the absurdly mundane, turning a routine trip into a ride you won’t want to end.

From the moment you arrive, creator and performer Tom Knowles establishes an atmosphere of playful repartee. As Terry, your Uber driver and host, he exudes an effortless naturalism—so much so that it’s easy to forget he’s playing a character. His voice is big, filling the tight space with an energy that immediately livens up the area. Instead, he seamlessly navigates the tiny venue – his van – with a massive charisma. Knowles skilfully weaves details about the audience into the show. Before we even step inside the van, he’s already memorised names, asked about our day, and built a sense of camaraderie that makes us feel like willing participants rather than passive spectators. Just nine of us, packed in snugly, forced into immediate, slightly awkward closeness with our seat neighbours.

This is no ordinary Uber. It’s a Temu-fied party van, decked out with audience-controlled LED lighting, a fog machine, and karaoke screens begging us to sing along. The result is a space that feels both intensely familiar and completely surreal—equal parts road trip, interactive theatre, and fever dream. Through his music, Terry lets us into his world—his job, his dreams, his frustrations, and his enduring, almost obsessive love for his wife, Mary. The songs range from a sincere, heartfelt ballad about his devotion to Mary to an absurdly dramatic number about his dead father-in-law. The show thrives on this balance between sincerity and ridiculousness—every tender moment is undercut with humour, every joke laced with a strange kind of pathos.

Visually, Roadkill leans into its own absurdity. Stock footage plays on the karaoke screens, providing a hilariously low-budget yet strangely effective form of world-building. One moment, we’re watching generic wedding visuals, the next, a vague montage of pastoral landscapes. The DIY aesthetic—LED strips, smoke machines, and the undeniable reality that we are, in fact, just sitting in a parked car—adds to the immersive weirdness of it all. The contrast between the slickness of traditional musical theatre and the raw, makeshift quality of the production makes the experience feel strangely liminal, as if we’ve stepped into a space that exists somewhere between performance and reality.

At its core, Roadkill is a heartfelt musical about a man who just really, really loves his wife. But beyond that, it’s a celebration of the beauty in the banal—the poetry of small talk, the drama of an everyday conversation, the weird, transient intimacy of a car ride with a stranger. 

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