I first reviewed Soliloquy in November 2024, when it premiered as part of the Hiko! New Works festival at The Meteor Theatre. It was clear then that this play showed the hallmarks of what makes for excellent theatre: a sharp, emotionally intelligent, original work, born from local talent and ready to be shared further. Now more than a year later, it’s incredibly rewarding to see this show return as part of the Hamilton Arts Festival/Toi Ora ki Kirikiriroa.

The premise remains unchanged: Hamish Larson Jr. (Harry Marshall) arrives at a cliff‑edge picnic site intending to scatter his father’s ashes, but finds himself unable to do it. Olivia (Hannah Doherty) appears – “there to contemplate some things” – and the two fall into a winding, often loquacious conversation about grief, memory, free will, and the ghosts we inherit.

Over the next hour, the play traces Hamish’s attempt to make sense of his father’s death and his own spiralling thoughts, guided and challenged by Olivia and the occasional intrusion of his father’s ghost (Conor Maxwell).

Once again, I was able to speak to the cast and writer-director James Smith, just before the second show at HAF-TOKK, to learn more about what has evolved since the show premiered. After Hiko!, the play re-emerged for The Meteor’s 2025 GET LEARNT season to an audience of high schoolers, and a change of cast, with Hannah Doherty taking over the Olivia role. In local theatre, it’s rare that a performer gets to return to a character once a season is done – and it’s clear that the cast have had great opportunities to refine their performances and dynamics over the last ~14 months.

The team agreed that this season has been another opportunity to discover fresh paths through the script: a mature audience at the first show responded more keenly to the existential parts of the script; the intimate staging at the Japanese Garden of Contemplation made the subtleties of performances easier to connect; and the chance to revisit these characters felt both comfortable and more assured.

A full house gathered on the night, welcomed by the late David Bowie’s Blackstar tracks (and some cross-noise from neighbouring performances). While the first ten minutes of the show were a little big for the space, the actors soon settled into the pavilion, and met the audience where they were: mere inches away from the guard rail, taking in this display of grief.

Marshall’s Hamish Jr. remains the emotional centre of the piece, still “running through a maze blindfolded,” as they said in 2024 – and that still feels apt. Hamish is navigating his first major grief, wrestling with anger, confusion, and the pressure to grieve on others’ terms, and Marshall keeps him grounded even as the script pushes him into heightened emotional terrain. It’s once again a tender, restless and recognisably young performance that showcases their growing skills as a performer.

And then there is Doherty’s Olivia, steering away from youthful sharpness and leaning into an older sister dynamic opposite Hamish. Firm, caring, and quietly wise, Doherty’s mature interpretation puts strong emphasis on the matters of agency, and how grief can make us feel both trapped and untethered and rob us of personhood. Rounding off the trio is Maxwell, who shared that he found it rewarding to dial down the hypermasculinity of his first iteration of Hamish Sr., and deliver something more grounded, a little softer, and more tender.

The script does grow quite wordy and dense at time, but I suspect this intentionally feeds directly into the play’s meta‑theatrical preoccupations of text, analysis, and the analysis of analysis, before whipping back into a joke about puddles. It’s forgivable, especially when it reinforces the play’s sense of characters trying to read their own lives as if they were a text they might one day understand.

What continues to impress me is how the play tightens as it progresses, the interlacing threads weaving closer and closer. This is not Hamlet dressed in a button-down, but something different. And once the audience unlocks the intertextual and meta layers via the allusions and interpolations, the emotional core becomes clearer and something more special. The matter of grief deepens. The questions about agency and free will become more sinuous. The questions become greater, but answering them is not the exercise, nor would that be honest.

Hamish doesn’t get the answers he wants, but he finds himself on the road to peace (with some beautifully timed oratorio bleeding into the garden to conclude the show). And so the most important thing is not clarity, but company, the willingness to ask difficult questions, and the presence of someone beside you while you do. It’s a thoughtful, rewarding, well‑acted piece of theatre, and this season reveals just how adaptable and resonant the script is. It reminds us that you always have less time with people than you think, and that the work of healing begins in conversation.

Soliloquy remains a play with a solid core and a generous heart, made stronger with each season, and I urge you to catch the final show at HAF-TOKK, 1 March, if you can.

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