A full house, a haze of dry ice and an expectant air. Even so, none of us audience can be ready for what’s to come. That’s ideal! Now, let the surprises do their work.

Stories within suitcases. A moustachioed traveller is detained by border security. ‘Would you please open your bags, sir.’

The traveller turns to us and warns, ‘This isn’t lost luggage; it’s the luggage of the lost.’

The traveller (Ralph McCubbin Howell) is shifty, evasive, ominous. Composer Tane Upjohn Beatson cues us with film noire ambience. Asking the traveller to cooperate, the officer (actor and director, Hannah Smith) spins a memorable metaphor. ‘Think of life as the carousel. Be efficient: comply. Don’t be an oversized bag.’ 

‘Don’t be an oversized bag.’ The traveller looks put out, gifting us a little wit (McCubbin Howell scripted Suitcase Show), a keepsake. 

Further wit: Smith points to her x-ray screen. ‘Are these matches flammable?’ The audience laughs, and the joke is dandled between the two actors a while.

In one story, a village’s tiny houses light to a melody. In another story, the traveller blows light, illuminating a different diorama. Each suitcase is an enchanting, grisly story.

Atop two suitcases in the dark, with wristbands as glowing eyes, McCubbin Howell’s hands become two strangers— one economy, one business class—who meet and boogie to electronica and—I squeal at the genius—ascend in the retractable luggage handles cum elevators; who meet and get electrocuted; who meet and get it on and hello here’s a baby, now they’re leaving home, zooming off in yonder remote controlled car and there go the parents’ souls, drifting up on the loose joint of those wrists. Suitcase Show harnesses the mind’s gullibility: despite the trick being obvious, I’m astonished the two dancers can be so in synch! The team plays into that transparency. Its worlds and narratives are that engrossing, it doesn’t matter that we see which way the projectors beam and the pragmatic and labour-intensive ways McCubbin Howell is instrumental in setting up the illusions. We’re spellbound.

After the show, one viewer shakes his head in disbelief over this literal handling of the acetates, the overhead projector, the crepe, torches, turntables, figurines. Organisation, orchestration, he calls it. ‘With LED goggles!’ I reply, referring to the preparation and planning needed for McCubbin Howell to execute the staging automatically, while somewhat blinded and in the dark. It’s thrillingly demanding: using low-fi to feed the story in real time. That is, keeping pace with the music and an accelerating narrative, orating while flicking switches, operating apparatus, swiping suitcases. McCubbin Howell is actor with one hand and dressed-in-black, ‘back-stage’ technician with the other. His dexterity is made good by technical design team Filament Eleven 11. And after the show, the audience swarms to these props, to the rigging behind the illusions.

After an amusing early scene, slapstick actors Anya Tate-Manning, Richard Falkner reappear for a brutal, hilarious finale/denouement I won’t further spoil.

Trick of the Light unmistakably shares the ethos of the band Birdfeeder, puppeteers Zoe Higgins and Pája Neuhöferová, and Stephanie Cairns, who collaborated on The Veiled Isle, a 2022 production.

Some suitcase stories are soviet cold winds and dismembering splatter. One, however, gives us a plausible foretaste of the disasters we owe our kids (or ourselves, frankly) through climate change. Floods. Water rises. ‘Pack a suitcase. Keep it close.’ In an otherwise killer and masterfully ludicrous show, here’s this unsettling, viable sequence that will resonate with many viewers. The traveller swivels suitcases into a bunch, lights either side of the dark, modular mound, sits therein and draws his doomsday message onto his lap. It’s only now we realise that the incomprehensible rearranging of luggage was to this end: fleeing a drowned homeland, he’s cramped in an aeroplane seat. Here he is, just like that. 

Exhilarating, macabre and whizz bang. Trick of the Light show us that when there’s a will to tell a story, there are unlimited ways.

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Expectations are high as we settle into the makeshift tiered seating at Hawea Flat Hall for the latest production from critically acclaimed theatre company, Wellington’s own Trick of the Light Theatre. The moody set: a simple black curtain, a few hanging lights and a big pile of suitcases … But hang on, there’s a tiny moving figurine in an open suitcase! And someone at a screen looking at luggage x-rays – oh-oh, it’s Border Security (Hannah Smith).

A well-dressed man (Ralph McCubbin Howell) arrives to be grilled by the border security guard – patronising and power-tripping. Most of us have encountered this very guard! “Everything has a catch,” the man warns but open the bags he must. So ensues the baggage check, one-by-one, giving us each story from right out of each suitcase.

A murder mystery in a village, a romance in an airport, a Russian aristocrat on the run, an astronaut’s musings on what he’s seeing, the dreaded ‘2nd bag-screening’ that “no-one returns from”…

Murder, death and general gloom and doom – apart from the amusing R-rated hand/puppet encounter – are the theme.

The dark tales, between the border security banter, are short and seemingly unconnected until … No spoilers here!

‘Trick’ are renowned for their moody shows, inventive use of light, wit and all round clever clogness. This production doesn’t disappoint – shadow work, hand puppets (of course you only need headtorches for eyes!), screens, overhead projector, tiny movie backdrops, lit and moving tiny figurines … and the inspired off-stage pre-recorded ‘climax’.

These stories are “tiny in scale but expansive in story” says the Company. Some of the stories work better than others and you have to be sharper than me to keep up with what the heck is going on sometimes.

It’s fairly hard to see everything if you’re up the back as things are small and add to that trying to see around heads in front. I imagine the front row, in the middle, is the best place to see this Suitcase Show. There are some technical issues with the overhead projector/astronaut story when we can’t see what is on the screen, and a bit of confusion with fast changes of transparencies.

McCubbin Howell is working harder than anyone ever has on stage creating his own lighting with torches and more – and ‘pulling rabbits out of hats’ for special effects. Smith does a very funny masterclass in ‘how to eat a sandwich while bored’. 

This production doesn’t quite create the magic of some previous shows but I suppose that’s the downside of being a Company who have set themselves such a high bar.  It’s still a top-quality theatre experience and well worth your time. 

Sit at the front.

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Upon entering the dimmed auditorium at Hannah Playhouse (Downstage) we’re greeted by an impressive pile of innocuous suitcases on stage – kinda like the baggage claim at an airport.

Ah, and there’s innocuous muzak playing overhead. Meanwhile Co-Director Hannah Smith, looking like innocuous and bored Airport Security Staff (ASS) is seated at what looks an X-ray Scanner. Luggage passes by on her large screen. She’s looking for anything and everything illegal or suspicious looking.

Enter a moustached man wheeling in a carryon suitcase. He wears a noir-style overcoat and fedora. Looking suspiciously Humphrey Bogart-ish, film noir-ish – think The Maltese Falcon – co-creator/director Ralph McCubbin Howell is our mysterious Gentleman Narrator (GN).

Turns out the big pile of suitcases belong to him. ASS asks the GN to open his suitcases, one by one. He resists at first, then obliges charmingly.

That’s when each delicious, dark, funny, poignant and surprising story is revealed. Each suitcase contains a film noirish fairytale.

Touted as “an eclectic box set (or suitcase set – forgive pun) of short stories” and “tiny in scale but expansive in story”, these tales are reminiscent of Brothers Grimm. Delightfully child-like but not suited for children, I would take my 12+ kids any day.

Miniature sets fold out from suitcase compartments like extraordinary pop out paper cards. The Belgian creatives ‘Dimanche’ come to mind as I watch a miniature snow-covered town come to life, each house lighting up magically from the inside. GN’s fingers are animated, dancing across each tiny set as he tells us about the Devil that came to town…

Turns out there’s nothing innocuous about the Suitcase Show and what and WHO we’re about to be entertained by. GN (Ralph McCubbin Howell) holds us enthralled within each of his suitcase compartments. And every part of each suitcase is imaginatively used, from the telescopic handles to the spinner wheels.

Playful staging utilises gorgeous lo-fi and hi-fi lighting by the talented team that is Filament Eleven 11 (Rachel Marlow and Bradley Gledhill), from shadow play to tricky wireless projection. From finger puppets and dancing hands (star-crossed lovers) to tiny cars and trains whizzing among the suitcases, lit like tall buildings, a noir-like city at night …

From ‘The Astronaut’ who gazes back at our lost earth (climate change) to ‘The Autocrat’ chasing and being chased by his own shadow shaped like a bear, each short suitcase story is riveting, with its deceptively deep, poignant message, this play is an absolute joy to experience.

I love this play and everything deliciously child-like about it.

When I was a child, I used to put on shows for my parents each week. Telling my unfortunately ‘captivated’ audience stories made up on the spot. Using shadow play and magic tricks that mostly never worked, all that didn’t matter. What mattered was my childlike joy in the experience of storytelling.

The Suitcase Show brings back this joy for me, only all their magic tricks work like magic. Trick of the Light does it again. Absolutely gorgeous. Don’t miss this delicious show!

Spoiler alert! Our Gentleman Narrator is more noir than gentleman. [Spoiler averted – ed]

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Trick of the Light theatre company excels in creating shows that play with light and darkness, both technically and metaphorically. From The Bookbinder, way back to The Road that Wasn’t There, which premiered at the Hamilton Gardens Arts Festival in 2012, their plays have enchanted audiences all around New Zealand and much further afield, with their cunning use of shadowing, papercut miniatures and tiny screens all stitched in their storytelling. 

This Suitcase Show must be one of their most technically challenging – and one of their most beguiling. It is a must see.

It opens on a dark set stacked with suitcases and a customs official asking a coat-clad stranger in a battered trilby hat to see inside his cases. Reluctant at first, as he explains that the cases have mysterious contents and each one defines a different world or story, the stranger gradually unclasps each one, with the phrase “There is a catch” as they click open.

The stories unpack, one case at a time. A screen is revealed in the lid of one offering an animated story set in a remote frozen village with a scared little match girl and frantic villagers. Another tells of an autocrat who tries to avoid capture from rebels, and escapes in a train which miraculously begins to circle around another case. But there’s more, so much more than seeing these as folk tales despite the bleak European snowscapes and accents.

There’s a desperate voyage into space from an astronaut who turns his telescope back in time to see the drowned world he is escaping from: a story played out through filmy images and acetate sheets on an overhead projector.  A brilliant dance sequence over the issue of hand luggage is too special to reveal, but it brings a gasp and applause from the audience.

As the Stranger, Ralph McCubbin-Howell moves through these case studies effortlessly, though each brings new technical challenges, different voices, accents and interactions.  With Hannah Smith as the implacable customs official, monotonously insisting that each case is opened, the poignancy of each case meets ponderous bureaucracy. “I don’t want to be your friend,” the Stranger is advised, as on the computer above the official’s desk, scans of suitcase interiors flick past.

Occasionally on the same screen there are customs colleagues in a bland room who are routinely called up but are reluctant to move from their card game. But the small CCTV screen suddenly takes the focus as off-stage-on-screen action explodes in the customs room, while on-stage the official opens a lunch box, to the soft and gentle strains of ‘Leaving On a Jet Plane’. It’s a brilliant juxtaposition of action and tension against a moment of relaxation.

The sound is a compilation of soundtrack and created music, by their frequent musical collaborator, Tane Upjohn-Beatson, with a range as wide as the incredible vocal dexterity of McCubbin-Howell. The sound and storytelling are choreographed immaculately.  

Suitcase Show is an incredibly imaginative use of contemporary technology and repurposed devices, turning suitcases into a portable record player, a laptop screen, a train track.  So many reels and screens appear in suitcase lids … The array of imaginative devices is breathtaking.

But more than this technical enchantment, each story builds an awareness of frailty and temporality; our feeble human condition. After all, we all carry baggage, but this lonesome traveller’s baggage seems to belong to other people.

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Trick of the Light, a collaboration between Hannah Smith and Ralph McCubbin Howell, presented their original play Suitcase Show to a sold-out crowd, at the Suter Theatre on 29 October 2024, 8pm. This fusion of theatre technology, soundscape, stories, and excellent acting techniques are performed as part of the Nelson Arts Festival.  

The pre-set is one of despondency. We see a pile of stacked suitcases (of different sizes) centre stage. A woman (played by Hannah Smith) sits down stage left at a tech desk, with her back to the audience. She has a microphone and a large monitor. Downstage right, we see a 1970s turntable with a wee figure on it. As the houselights dim, a column of light directs us to a door upstage right, where a man (Ralph McCubbin Howell) stands dressed in vintage film noir attire: brimmed hat and long trench coat.

The woman speaks in her microphone in a dead pan manner: “Do you have something to declare?”. She is clearly a border clerk at an airport somewhere. The cryptic man holds his boarding pass. “The luggage isn’t mine, and it isn’t lost,” he promises her. “This is the luggage of the lost.” The woman insists that all the bags be opened, and their contents revealed. The man obliges her, and as he opens each bag, different stories are told or created using brilliant sound design and composition by Tane Upjohn Beatson and videography by Dean Hewison.

The first suitcase opened reveals a tiny town at night, all lit up and covered in snow. A hidden mini projector illuminates mini people interacting in one small village hall. The man narrates while adding crunch sounds in the snow – this adds to our imagination and draws us in.

A crowd favourite is told through the man’s hands and is a reference to “hand luggage”. Adorable. Howell proves to be a brilliant actor here, as his two hands go through the stages of a relationship from meeting, falling in love, having a child, growing elderly to life’s end. Very little text is used; convincing hand movements and actor generated soundscape keep us laughing, oohing, and aweing.

Another story requires hand shadow puppetry where the hand and its shadow respond and react to each other. A tiny model train is featured in another story and in another, a 1980s overhead projector is unpacked to project charming cartoon images of rocket time-travel from 6024 back to 2024.

All the while, these stories of love, climate change, obsession and death engage the audience. The border clerk woman is indifferent to the tales. She switches between channels on her monitor to show her two colleagues (played by Richard Falkner and Anya Tate-Manning), waiting in a special attention room, playing cards. Eventually, the man goes into that room for a surprise ending that does not disappoint.

Overall, Suitcase Show is more enchanting than the talking rug and candlestick in Beauty and the Beast. The show’s magic is more than amazing technology – Howell and Smith commit to the vintage props and classic projectors which work on our nostalgia for what has been lost through progress. Howell’s acting talent is a notable reason for the play’s superpower.

Suitcase Show is a wonderful hour of exciting theatre.

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Trick of the Light are back with another super clever show, packing out Te Auaha Theatre as part of a NZ mini tour. The audience is overtly well-versed in the unique nature of TOTL’s highly visual and intricate offerings. This is a one-hour show and it is a tasty outing from a group that has long ago made its theatrical bones and paid its artistic dues worldwide.

When I first heard of the basic idea – that suitcases presented to customs at an airport will disgorge their unsettling contents – I grabbed at pre-conceived images of, say, a rubber life raft self-inflating from its tight packaging and taking over the world. That has it totally the wrong way round.

As the mountain of bags are unlatched, the contents, as such, don’t come at you. They invite you inside to luxuriate with meticulously crafted models and video clips that tell unsettling stories falling under the general admonition that “There’s always a catch”. The catches are both real and relevant in today’s lonely and angst-ridden world – right down to the visceral ache of endless pandemics and climate change.  

So, think less about projections and more about your being sucked into tiny worlds of horror or, at the very least, sobering surprises. A microcosm world where a visual plane no bigger than a briefcase lid allows you to engage with audaciously grand ideas in deliciously tiny packages: a miniaturised piece of Walkman-like kit bursting with semi satanic themes.

The staging pretext is that a super confident but eerily odd traveller (Ralph McGubbin Howell) confronts customs/aviation security (Hannah Smith) after they’ve hauled his massive accumulation of luggage from the airport carousel. He flings open the door and – this is hugely important – steps into the dark.  Along with the ‘big into little’, this inversion of ‘light into dark’ further forces the viewer into the images emanating from the bags.

There is a backwards and forwards interrogation of the traveller in a darkened Customs room, a place normally flooded with light, where the fluent and commanding traveller oddly holds court. Yet another inversion of perception to skew the view. On the soundtrack brutally loud recorded airport noises overwhelm us, softening us up for some rather hellish messages and insights. (I recall one British commentator some years ago opining that his personal vision of Hell was an infinite series of airport concourses).

The traveller is no bowler hatted eccentric blown in off the street. He emerges as a literary someone it would be indelicate for a reviewer to identify upfront. Suffice it to say that his vicelike grip on both the narrative and the proceedings is robustly conceived and determinative of the plot.

The emerging pre-packed tales never end well. They start with a model village dusted with a sudden snowstorm and pock marked with cloven footed tracks. The combination of model and narrative are beguiling; I would have sworn I could see the individual glistening snowflakes from my back row seat. This precious vision of beauty (the showing) is sharply dissonant with the traveller’s bloodless narrative (the telling). It’s a Grimm’s fairy story gone wrong. Even the little Match Girl cops it. As I said, there is always a catch.

Then there is a story that would truly merit the tag “something completely different”. An important defrocked somebody from the Eastern bloc (we suppose) is shown on a small screen running away via train from his own shadow and a very persistent small bear. I immediately think of Shakespeare’s “Exit pursued by a bear” [The Winter’s Tale]. It’s the sort of thing we associate with VistaVision and the bold excesses of Albert Hitchcock. But the same effect is miraculously conveyed with some real impact in a minute shadow box version. The running man is cornered and dealt to. The audience hopes it was Putin.

Surprises keep coming, like channelling of the Earthrise picture taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts after looking back at their Earth but in an Australasian context alongside the dire physical discomfort that will come from inundation through sea level rise.

The audience favourite is clearly some nifty traveller handwork that encapsulates the experience of a couple determined to have intimate relations in the business lounge of the airport. By the actor merely clipping on red lights like a wristwatch on each hand and using tiny spotlighting/blackouts, we see the near instant creation of two marvellous skin-puppet characters. They assume a giddy array of full body postures from the entire Kama Sutra range and then some. A visual knockout worth the admission charge times two.

There is a breakout monitor screen that shows us more of the bag inspection team and some amazing goings on that lead to the final plot resolution. It’s as if some clever cabaret act suddenly reveals the meaning of life.

The audience leaves fully satisfied, having had its senses well tricked and inventively strummed. TOTL is getting highly practised at turning out imaginative/satirical views of our ho-hum lives allied with social messages that resonate with a succinct truth. This version is not from their absolute top shelf but it is way ahead of the pack.  Grab what’s on offer while it’s there.

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The foyer of the Gryphon Theatre – currently designated FatG (Fringe at the Gryphon) – is packed with an eclectic range of Trick of the Light fans, eager to see their next offering. Doubtless they’ve seen all or some of Ralph McCubbin Howell and Hannah Smith’s previous shows: The Road that Wasn’t There (2013-20), The Bookbinder (2014-19), Beards, Beards, Beards (2015-16), The Devil’s Half-Acre (2016), Troll (2017-20), The Griegol (2021-22). Most are award-winning shows at home and abroad so the anticipation is palpable.

The production details supplied to Theatreview describe Suitcase Show as “an eclectic box set of short stories. Dark, spiky and comic, each one is told out of a suitcase. … Tiny in scale, but expansive in story, the work has been built through a series of showings in unusual spaces, from a pub to a photography darkroom. This Fringe season will be its full-length premiere.”

I take this as meaning the work is fully developed but following a 15 minute delay in starting (a peril of having a show with a complex tech setup sandwiched between two other shows with only 30 minute turnarounds between them?) there is a hold-up midway, to fix an audio-mixing problem. Subsequent sound is still not perfect so some of Tane Upjohn-Beatson’s otherwise evocative sound design and some mic’d dialogue remain indistinct. And at the end of the show McCubbin says they are still in development and he asks for feedback, at the bar, via a QR code or via their website. Since a review has been requested, I’ll offer my feedback this way.

In the pre-set gloom we discern a collection of different sized suitcases, redolent of an unclaimed baggage depot. Director and operator Hannah Smith sits at a tech-desk downstage left, facing upstage. As the houselights fade we realise a shadow of a tiny person is rotating on the lid of a small suitcase and discover there is a figurine on a turntable (in a 1970s portable stereo). Cute.

The portentous appearance and entrance of a back-lit Man wearing a long coat and broad-brimmed hat is a classic film noir trope. Actually the use of suitcases in stage shows has also become a well-used trope over the past couple of decades. A person with a suitcase implies an arrival or departure and instantly raises who, why and where questions. In this case – or should I say these cases – the enigmatic man (McCubbin Howell) is at a boarder of some kind facing questions about the contents of the cases from a seated woman (Smith). The heavy echo effect on her mic renders most of her words unintelligible (a device they also used in The Devil’s Half-Acre so I assume it’s intended).

Her insistence on wanting bags opened provokes gentle word-play and the comment that this is not lost luggage but the luggage of the lost. As each case is opened, a story plays out that justifies that claim.

The tale of a Little Match Girl for whom an unseasonable fall of snow is more than a match, plays out on a tiny town-scape. Two creatures made of hands with bright coloured eyes perform what turns out to be a mating dance. Another story involves hand shadow puppetry where the shadow behaves differently from the hand – a cleverly created effect where the medium (for me) transcends any message. And from where I sit, a hand gets in the way of its shadow.

A tiny model train features in another story. There is a telescope in space that looks back at our blue planet through time, in millennial leaps from 6024 to 2024. Climate change becomes the focus and its refugees – or are they displaced victims of war – become the carriers of suitcases, evoked through an extraordinary blend of OHP, animated projection and shadows.

Throughout, the enigmatic Man warns the Boarder Guard the contents of the cases may reveal more than we wish to know and that all the stories end the same way. Meanwhile the Boarder Guard has screen contact with two colleagues (Richard Falkner and Anya Tate-Manning) who play cards and drink while waiting to be sent someone who needs special attention.

Inevitably the Man is sent there … and I find what happens there problematic in ways I can’t discuss fully without spoilers. Put it this way: while The Grim Reaper is a harbinger-cum-personification of Death, s/he is not a murderer. As I understand it, s/he harvests souls. But what we see in the climactic scene is a display of visual trickery that, for my money, cheapens what we’ve been drawn into. Or is the jokey ending intended – like the jig at the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, or a Satyr Play after a festival of Greek Tragedies?

Obviously there will be technical improvements tonight and tomorrow. But overall I feel the component parts still need to coalesce in a way that becomes more than the sum of the parts. A critique of the human condition, perhaps, wherein the fatal flaws that are exposed lead to the inevitable downfall of humanity. 

Meanwhile it’s worth spending 50 minutes enjoying the trademark Trick of the Light creativity.  

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