It’s a wild rainy night in Takaka but all the seats are filled in the Village Theatre. It is worth braving the weather to see a fun piece of theatre, as that is what the marketing promises us. The stage is set up with a clothing rack laden with bright coloured costumes and baskets of other props, wigs and shoes framing the opposite side of the stage. It’s a hint of what is to come. I’m slightly worried as I’m not a fan of ‘high-prop use’ theatre.

Beryl and Gladys from Glad Rags Cleaning enter the auditorium to clean it before the show starts. Beryl shows off her high-tech vacuum cleaner on her back. “It runs on wifi and sucks the dust up high into the cloud.” This interactive start to the show sets the tone of the relationship between actor and audience. Direct and personable, funny and cheeky.

Beryl and Gladys, played by Jennifer Currie and Trish Sullivan, claim to be Nelson’s best cleaners. But they weren’t always the best in cleaning…. They take us back in time to Ms Mason’s year 8 class with Gladys as an inquisitive young student. From this point in time the audience is taken on a journey: a long string of ever changing curious and unexpected careers. The transitions between those short skits are seamless and most of the props, costumes and wigs are indeed used to portray Beryl and Gladys and the people they encounter throughout the years.

I really enjoy the skits where Currie and Sullivan are using toy instruments, movement and outrageous costumes to show off their careers in ballet, opera and acrobatics.

While the actresses continue in high speed to switch from scene to scene, the heavy rain batters on the roof of the theatre and it becomes very hard for the audience to hear the actors. This disruption, paired with the repetitiveness of stringing together many short scenes and transitions, results in my disengagement with the characters. I can see Gladys and Beryl as hilarious roaming entertainment on festivals, functions and events (as they have done so far).

This Nelson Fringe Festival award winning show, Rubber Gloves – The Glad Rags Story, written by Jennifer Currie, is their first stage show. It has plenty of funny one-liners, over the top make-up, shiny costumes and solid character work. I’d love to see this paired up with a good storyline, some grunty conflict and tension to keep me gripped until the end.

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Opera, sequins, kazoos, acrobatics, ballet, over-the-top makeup and the broadest Kiwi accents since Lyn of Tawa, Rubber Gloves is sheer fun. The premise is that two cleaners, Gladys and Beryl, have come to clean the theatre only to discover it is full of people. They tell us they weren’t always cleaners and proceed to take us on a rollercoaster ride of their lives and improbable careers, segueing from one character to another.

Jennifer Currie and Trish Sullivan, who play the respective Beryl and Gladys, have a nice dynamic with Sullivan playing the vibrant, vivacious Gladys and Currie playing the more understated and self-deprecating Beryl. The character changes are done well, with no disruption to the flow, maintaining the constant dialogue with a lot of one-liners that the audience really appreciates.

Some funny moments occur, like when Beryl can’t get one of her rubber gloves off to play a new character, whispering to the audience, “Well I couldn’t get it off, could I.” They often break the fourth wall much to the delight of the audience.

Personal favourites from the montage of ‘jobs’ they had include Gladys’s stint as an avant garde hairdresser and Beryl’s job in a call centre with the ‘phone’ that kept forgetting to ‘ring’.

Hopefully we will see more of Beryl and Gladys, there is potential for a fuller and richer story. They are certainly a lot of fun but I’m not sure if I would have them clean my house!

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