Most of us are familiar with the experience of ‘skin hunger’, whether or not we were even aware it had a name. It’s a deep longing and aching desire for physical contact with another person. 

The recent pandemic and the subsequent quarantines and self-isolation periods left many of us craving much more physical touching than we were receiving. And this was only a temporary inconvenience. Losing a life partner, losing their touch and companionship, makes a few months of watching daytime telly and learning how to make sourdough pale in comparison.

Tatiana Hotere has, through the endless curveballs that life throws at us, brought us into the grief, hilarity, pain and confusion of the ‘after-sex’. The strange, turbulent quagmire of sex after marriage, after death, but sex before we learn to accept those curveballs and pelt them straight back at an uncaring world. And despite the success of her outstanding one woman show, despite the countless performances and audiences, her grief is clearly still raw and it… I don’t want to say it ‘threatens to bubble over’ …  it is encouraged to do so. She embraces her grief, cradles her fears and nurtures the challenges. And we, the audience on a chilly Sunday night, are equally encouraged and nurtured by her stories.

A semi-autobiographical, masturbatory experience of self-expression, self-exploration and self-forgiveness, Skin Hunger wraps us up in a silk kimono, slips a cheeky glass of red into your hands and launches you into the harsh realities of losing the love of your life.

Eva (Hotere) is recently widowed, struggling with the ever-present guilt of existing as a woman raised in a roman catholic background. As she struggles to accept the hand that life has dealt her from a very young age, she slowly learns to break the chains of her repressive upbringing with help from her husband, her fabulous friend Lorraine (who is someone I would love to share a bottle or three of wine with) and a couple of willing partners in liberating ‘Situationships’.

Despite the progress that has been made, we still see the ridiculous double standards that women must fight against in everyday life: fighting for the freedom to love, touch and fuck whomever they choose; however they choose. Whether that be a man who rates his oral enthusiasm at a Spinal Tap-esque 12/10, a bar tender with an eye for the obvious or an array of brightly coloured sex toys arriving mid wax-job…

Eva fights the negative voices of a puritanical sister, priest, mother, church goers and god themselves. She escapes the archaic mindset of religion towards sex and sexuality, while maintaining faith in a much more real, human way. Coming to terms with her relationship with her god, and questioning why should something that feels so good, be considered so bad?

Her grief and self-doubt are evident throughout the performance, but she uses humour brilliantly to help herself and her audiences get to grips with it. Fabulously funny moments with dildo puppetry, tinder dates gone wrong, orgasms and self-reflection create a beautiful sense of hope.

It is this self-reflection and learning to forgive herself that allows her to be freed from the yoke of servitude; servitude to out-dated ideas, ideals and ghosts from the past. Constantly battling within herself, battling her grief and guilt that has plagued her from childhood for simply being born with a vagina. She comes to the startling realisation that to be shameless is nothing to be ashamed of.

Being shameless would mean that it is a bad thing to be free of shame. As an ex-catholic myself, I can share this feeling of freedom from the burden of self-loathing and self-doubt. And here we can see how the cathartic exercise of creating this wonderful piece of theatre has helped Tatiana grow, forgive herself and understand that while she will always love her husband, she can love herself, too.

It’s easy to tell when a show captures you as a reviewer, the performances when you walk out of the theatre with a notepad that only has 4 or 5 hastily scribbled notes that make no sense, are the performances that stick with you. This was one of those hastily scribbled notepad shows… but I did manage to scrawl down one gem, that I think sums up my feeling at the conclusion of Skin Hunger.

Everything will be OK in the end… and if it’s not OK, it’s not the end.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

I’ve experienced ‘Skin Hunger’ twice before. My last review can be found here: SKIN HUNGER – Theatreview/

Then, the show had a larger cast, now it’s a solo work. I call it ‘Skin Hunger – Solo’.

The original has been around the block, toured, evolved, changed lives, educated, titillated, provided work for actors and crew, been therapeutic, and, of course, entertained. There’s a good chance that, being a discerning theatre goer, you think you’ve already seen it and had your withers wrung (in a good way).

You may ask yourself, as I’m ashamed to admit I did, that, excellent though it was the first time around, do I really want another dose of ‘grief makes you horny’ and all its accoutrements when the heartache of Gaza and the Ukraine and all the killing of kids is making me want anything but?

Turns out it was exactly what I wanted – and needed – even though I questioned this at the time.

My ‘plus one’ had been to a meeting or some such dullary and hadn’t come with me the first time so she was keen. My son, age 21 had come with me the first time, and jumped at the chance to see it again.

So, decision made, we’re off to Q Loft.

Q Loft is my favourite small theatre since the demise of the Maidment Studio, and Tatiana Hotere is one of my absolute favourite actors currently working. She’s also one of my favourite writers, directors, producers, marketers, gracious hosts etc which leads me to this: if any production has earned arts funding, it’s ‘Skin Hunger’, and if any artist deserves full support, it’s Hotere.

Her potential, like her talent, is infinite.

So, come on funders, do your job!

Right from the lowering of the house lights it’s clear that this show has evolved. The set is different – the same, but different – and Hotere is gentler, engages more personally with her audience, welcomes us in, and we go willingly. Speeches about happiness and mental health hit home. Hotere is more available, more vulnerable tonight, than I’ve ever seen her before.

I am aware that there have been cruel, negative comments from fundamentalist evangelicals who see ‘Skin Hunger’ as an attack on Christianity, an attack that’s buried somewhere deep in all the eclectic talk of sex, the church, and finding oneself, an attack that is, in my view, completely without substance. Hotere’s experiences with Roman Catholicism in her home country mirror those of countless young women the world over and are handled truthfully, and with almost tender affection.

Clever Hotere though, she leaves any judgement of the clerical behaviour she speaks of, to us.

There is judicious trimming of the male characters from the earlier production which makes for a better balance but with no loss of the earthy bloke comedy embedded in the work. We understand without ponging it, where she went to seek solace, and this new subtlety is more than welcome. ‘Swiping right’ remains hilarious and the use of props to determine any future paramour – or six if possible – is truly funny.

Hotere really hits her straps when playing both herself and a drunken friend, and her use of vocal signals, body language, and visual triggers to isolate the two characters is not only very smart it’s also beautifully realised. Similarly, the relationship with her ultra-conservative, almost prudish, sister is enacted, this time, through phone calls and voice-over which result in our feeling quite conflicted – we disapprove of the sister’s interfering, but we like her too, and for the very same reasons.

There’s also a more tangible focus on growth and change and these qualities, embedded early, are more often than not delivered with wit and gentle humour – the feeling of being ‘happy sad’, discovering that first grey hair, the excitement of good sex after a long wait, and the feeling that you’re cheating on your ex simply because what you’re doing is new and different.

Structurally, the text is richer, more subtle, going for ‘piccoli orgasmi multipli’ rather than the ‘starnuto grande’ of the original. Not to deride ‘the big sneeze’ but in this work ’many small sneezes’ opens us up and prepares us best for the restorative denouement that subsequently satisfies us most.

I suspect Hotere’s newly crafted lens on her autobiographical piece reflects well on the work she has done on herself to reach where she is today. It can’t be easy, having chosen a cathartic way to come to terms with a tragedy of the magnitude of losing your husband, to then have to live with the minutiae of it every day while crafting the text, then again in rehearsal, and ultimately, again, in performance in front of people you don’t even know every night for months, and maybe years, and to know it’s all your own choice. It takes courage in a rainbow of hues to adopt this approach and Hotere has that sort of courage by the palette full.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t Beethoven’s ‘Fifth’ or Handel’s ‘Messiah’, this is a chamber work, intimate, up close, probing, and revealing. More Bartok than Stravinsky, more Ibsen than Shakespeare, more Vermeer than Michelangelo, more to my taste than not. ‘Skin Hunger’ has lost nothing and gained much in it’s reworking. Rather like a master work which, when x-rayed, shows the painter’s earlier dabbling, the roadmap to excellence, an excellence which has been achieved later – and for ‘Skin Hunger’ that later is now.

I’ve purposely left the best until last.

An event in 2019, which I won’t elaborate on, has provided Hotere with her final metaphor and the inspiration we all need to move past the grief she’s shared with us, a grief that we now share with her, without in any way hiding from it or proclaiming some false closure. It’s profound, and magnificent, in the way if pulls all the threads together and has them spell ‘hope’.

There were tears in the dark (me) and tears in the foyer (my plus one).

One the way home my wonderful son exercised his Aspergers and jumped track from ‘Skin Hunger’ to anime and the zombie apocalypse. He knew exactly what he was doing, and why.

I can’t help but think the late Mr Hotere, from what I’ve learned of him, would have totally approved.

Please put ‘Skin Hunger -Solo’ on your ‘must-see’ list even if you think you’ve seen it before.

You haven’t, ‘Skin Hunger – Solo’ is a different show, and one you should see.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

Grief and libido are not topics generally lumped together. Yet these are the reasons a throng of women, and a few good sport male companions, have gathered in Toitoi’s function room, on this day transformed into a stage with tiered seating.

Tatiana Hotere, the star of this intense, autobiographical, hour-and-change long one woman show, ambles onto the stage in her underwear, caught on the hop by the full audience that make up the invisible fourth wall of her living room. She’s been summoned by insistent doorbell ringing, heralding the delivery of a bewildering number of dildos.

In her forties, Eva, a widowed mother of two, Brazilian import, wrestles with life after death, and her hungry skin that finds itself at odds with her Catholic guilt. In a powerful performance, Hotere grapples with both mourning and desire, eliciting tears of laughter and sadness, captivating the audience she addresses directly.

Though she performs solo, she voices, nay transforms, into the characters that populate her life. The shape of her shoulders, the tone of her voice, change completely when she apes her dead husband, as though she can become him from the depth of her knowing him.

The Madonna/whore dichotomy is illustrated on one hand by her impression of bawdy friend, Lorraine, who gets her on the apps and orders her sex toys, and by her sister, Julia. The latter speaks in Portuguese, in off stage voiceover, repeating the church’s party line down the phone. Eva always responds in English, illustrating the widening gulf between the two sisters’ perspectives.

Each dildo is held up in turn like a puppet illustrating the litany of bad Tinder dates she must endure before meeting the elusive Mr 12, a man who leaves her with three orgasms and chlamydia. Her doctor, who shames her then breaks confidentiality to gossip about her to the other women of the church, is played by a pink string of anal beads.

This is a show of contrasts. From the yoga mat to downing five tequila shots and sleeping with the barman. From a genuine expression of faith to raging against divine injustice. From sadness to laughter. From grief to desire.

In reconciling her religion, in which she still believes despite its patriarchal repression, with a rejection of shame and an acceptance of grief, Hotere manages to encapsulate the spectrum of human experience with an endearing honesty. Life does not neatly keep to one genre. It is as messy as it is beautiful. And just one thing is certain – that we are all going to die. But until we do, we live.

[ Note: This is a solo version of the multi-cast Skin Hunger that premiered in Auckland earlier this year.  – ed]

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer