It is 11:55 and we are escorted up the lift to 2/57 and safety inducted before being shown the made up sleep pods if needed (there shall be no sleep for me as a reviewer, however). This show goes for 7 hours so there are lots of snacks, various teas, and even an urn full of coffee to tide over the audience and crew.

The set is brilliant and makes you feel like you are really in a little studio apartment. On one side there is a couch, TV with Nintendo Switch, kitchenette area with a microwave, jug, container of water, makeshift bookshelf pantry – and is that a breadmaker? On the other side there is a bed, shelves, computer desk and jewellery cabinet. Wonderful homely touches like multiple plants, lamps, and soft toys also adorn the room. For us audience members there is a variety of seats, a couch and cushions for us to settle into for the night.

The Night is Always Darkest is a journey in real time through Lia’s sleepless night as a big life change weighs heavy on her mind and she overthinks, stresses, distracts herself and tries to express her feelings to those she loves. The twist to the show is that the audience gets to decide the next 7 hours and how it all plays out. Those million annoying voices in your head that you try to ignore and that keep you up at night – yeah, that is us, the audience, for the rest of this show.

It is pretty dark and Lia is lying in bed, presumably asleep, as we wait for the show to start. There is a giant screen beside the bed that lights up, showing Lia’s phone screen. She is on Messenger scrolling through her messages to her friend Phoebe and we learn that Phoebe is moving away soon and had a Tahi show tonight that Lia attended.

The screen now shows us a note with two options; try to sleep? Or turn on the lights? Discussions between us arise and we think she should try and sleep. After every decision is made by us a timer is placed on the screen, usually for 5 minutes, and that is how long Lia does the assigned task for before a loud alarm goes off (yes this alarm happens all night).

The first hour is really about the audience getting familiar with the giving and deciding options process, figuring out how to interact with Lia when she isn’t going to talk to us directly but will nod/shake her head or use gestures, and realising that the first answer we yell out is the one that will be used. It is also becoming clear that things we suggest, even just in jest with each other, may be used in the next lot of options to decide from.

This show is being streamed on Youtube and Twitch so when some options seem random to those of us there in person, they have actually been suggested by the online viewers.

Our first prompt of trying to sleep doesn’t work so we decide a sleepy tea will help. Chamomile is the one we choose and Lia proceeds to make 8 cups of tea, all for herself, before playing the drinking game Kings Cup with only herself, googling the rules. An origami fortune teller (throwback to childhood memories) is made by Lia while watching a tutorial video, and my friend next to me joins in from the couch.

The highlight of this hour is a dream journal where we decide what Lia dreamt of the night before and an insane dream about Lady Gaga riding edible unicorns is the result.

Hour two has us helping Lia play the New York Times games such as Wordle and Connections, an enforced bathroom break when it is the only option available to choose from, and more weird dreams, this time about sharks. We are starting to push boundaries with our suggestions and together decide on an interesting late-night snack for Lia of Mi Goreng noodles on slightly burnt toast accompanied by a lovely peppermint tea made with the noodles water.

Updating Lia’s profile on the dating app Hinge is an interesting experience as it is clearly from before her transition and we watch her change her pronouns, name, and photos. This must be a vulnerable moment for Lia but it is never made awkward and the audience enjoy picking out cute photos with hilarious captions.

The third hour brings three options to choose from for timings now: 1, 5 or 15 minutes. It also starts strongly with ‘call people’ as an option and then a list of who Lia can call. What would you do if your friend/child/sibling video called you at 2 in the morning? 

Three out of four of the people called actually answer and it is three very different conversations. Lia’s brother Ben is at a rave in Wellington and cannot hear a word she says but he appears to be having fun. Her parents who were asleep and are unsurprisingly concerned about their daughter. A friend has just got home from the same rave as Ben and is making himself some food.

For those worried these people will be genuinely concerned about Lia’s mental state, we are informed after the show that everyone given as an option on the call list had been made aware and consented to potentially being called at 2am.

There is another vulnerable moment when Cyproterone comes up as an option. A quick Google tells me it is a type of hormone therapy, sometimes called a testosterone blocker . Medication is important so we choose for Lia to take it and give her a minute to do so.

Some people arrive at the show who have just left the aforementioned rave and we have to catch them up on a few things before making Lia have her own rave.

Lia makes Phoebe a goodbye card and unfortunately none of us can remember where Phoebe is leaving to, so we have to rehash the messages from the start of the show to write our farewell message.

Four hours in and the audience are starting to go a bit crazy from sleep deprivation and giving more out-the-gate suggestions.

This hour brings Pokemon cards, a quite violent Nintendo game called Katana Zero, Lia dancing to Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girl’s Just Wanna Have Fun’, and a one-minute ‘ugly cry’.

Throughout the night there has been the recurring theme of Lia trying to send Phoebe an emotional message, but so far she has deleted and rewritten it multiple times. This time the message is finished and is about to be sent when the timer alarm goes off and Lia moves on to the next task. Will we ever see that message sent, or will our imposed times be the death of that idea?

We finish hour 4 by making Lia eat the unhinged snack idea of a pepperoni pizza with thinly sliced apple added to it and microwaved, adding a teaspoon of honey to it after one bite to try and enhance the flavour. I am feeling sorry for Lia and the food we are suggesting for her to eat, but she signed up for this after all.

From 4 to 5am, the main thing Li is doing is getting ready – with our assistance on her outfit, accessories, colours of nail polish and makeup. The audience takes these decisions very seriously, colour matching, making sure accessories match the dress, and making Lia do her makeup in just one minute.

There is also a callback to the Lady Gaga dream, and it is the first time an audience member is asked to participate in the actual show when Lia assigns them the job of being the real Lady Gaga. There is a bit of confusion from the latecomers as they were not here for the dream creation but it is still hilarious for all of us.

Two hours to go and we are all tired and should not be in charge of decision making. Lia must attempt a Guinness World Record and seeing a Rubix Cube I suggest the fastest time to solve it and a 15 minute timer. (It turns out that the record is 31 seconds.) Action movie music up loud for motivation and suspense, a cheat sheet from Google and a lot of encouragement ensues but after the allotted time Lia has sadly not solved the dreaded cube.

We are now being asked to assign times in seconds and someone says 1000, thinking it was a lot less time than the actual 16 minutes it became. Luckily this is for playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo so it is entertaining to watch and doesn’t drag out.

The message to Phoebe has finally been sent, the couch is now on the bed, and there are half finished tasks, meals and tea spread all over the layout. An on-screen prompt leads to the whole room having a sing-a-long to ‘Lose Yourself’ by Eminem, which is my highlight of the night.

As it nears 6am, the final and planned parts of the show are starting to happen. We are now just an audience watching it all unfold. I will not spoil these last events as they are a pivotal part of the show and should remain a surprise. I can, however, say that it is a beautiful ending to a rollercoaster of a night.

This is a very well thought out and intense show and could not happen without director Rosie Glover, the wonderful set design of Izzi Lao, stage manager Dom, and technical genius Campbell Wright running the ‘brain’ technology that is giving us our options, uploading our decisions, and also adding the random things we talk about haphazardly not realising he is listening, .

The Night is Always Darkest truly takes you on a journey through the mind of Lia throughout the seven hours. It makes you feel every kind of emotion with her, in real time.

I commend and respect Lia for opening herself up to the audience who are both strangers and friends to her in so many ways. There is a beautiful vulnerability in some of the things Lia allows us to see and experience, and that is what truly makes this show intimate. The biggest one being updating the Hinge profile which was from before her transition and includes what I assume is her dead name (the birth name of a transgender person who has changed their name as part of their gender transition) and male-presenting photos. We also instruct her to take her testosterone blocker and, later on, put on an oestrogen patch.

As an insomniac, I’ve enjoyed seeing someone experience some of the things I go through nightly, such as overthinking, stress and creative outbursts. Staying awake has not been a problem.

This is not an experience you can understand just by reading a review; you really have to be there, sleep deprived, with strangers, watching a person for 7 hours to truly ‘get’ it. So if you ever get the chance, I recommend you give it a go.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

It’s 11.50pm on a Friday night, and I’m about to attend a theatre show. Less of a show, more of an experience, perhaps, and I’m going to be at it for the next seven hours.

This is The Night is Always Darkest, a seven-hour durational theatre encounter, brought to you somewhat by the team behind a similar long-form work One Night Band. There’s maybe twenty people in the audience, a number that will rise and fall across the night, and we’re all dressed for comfort.

This show is a pseudo-real insomniac experience of Lia (played by Lia Kelly) and her desire and fear around sending a daunting text message. You may not think that’s enough to base a seven-hour show on, and you’d be wrong about that. The irony is that the text message is sent – and then unsent – within the first two hours of the show, and yet becomes the thread that pulls us through the rest of the evening.

Phoebe (played by Phoebe Caldeiro) is leaving Wellington, and Lia’s not feeling so great about it. After she left a show of Phoebe’s earlier in the night, she’s sleepless in her room, ruminating over sending a text to Phoebe. We’ve all been there. We, as the audience, get to control Lia’s night.

Some very clever projection use (tech by Campbell Wright) shows us a live feed of Lia’s phone, her computer, and gives us a choice of prompts which we can tell Lia to action in five-minute chunks. Things like ‘turn on lights’ and ‘check messages’ become bolder and more ludicrous across the night – moving into things like ‘have a dance party’, ‘find all the apples in your room’ and even ‘drink a spoonful of canola oil’ (which is an ongoing meme from one of the audience across the night and fortunately doesn’t actually happen).

We are Lia’s intrusive thoughts, and after so many hours awake, these thoughts get weirder and sadder and more frenetic. This layer of audience interaction becomes voyeuristic and often even discomforting.

The audience requests that Lia scrolls through her past messages with Austin (Harrison), way back to the start of their friendship, and this isn’t staged. They’re real messages, real private conversation laid out in front of us and it feels… invasive. I don’t know how much of this was discussed beforehand, but I don’t love being part of it. Austin sticks his head through the curtain behind me and says, to the tune of, “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever been part of.” No kidding.

A particular prompt about taking a particular daily medication – which I recognise the name of immediately but the rest of the audience clearly doesn’t as they prompt Lia to Google it – being left by the wayside by the audience for far too long really gets to me. I know it’s staged, but it still feels like we’re being negligent, and I find myself being annoyed by the rest of the groupthink, who prompt Lia with collage or cooking or something else lighter for what feels like far too long.

That is, in essence, the skill of this production. Good theatre makes you feel things, and I’m certainly feeling a lot right now from a situation I know is staged but hits me altogether too hard in the chest. If we are Lia’s intrusive thoughts, what are we representing? It’s 4am and I’m queasy, adrift at sea.

I don’t know if the audience is feeling the same about this experience as I am, but I do have to duck out of the room a few times during the show because it just gets too much. Utilising social media and integrating projection into theatre isn’t new – hell, I’ve done a similar real time show set on social media myself – but it’s more complex when these people are playing themselves, or at least a version of themselves that bleeds into the real.

It’s clever, but it’s surreal. Audience members divorced from context who have wandered into this show on a whim might not have this experience, but tonight’s audience is almost entirely people from the interwoven web that is Pōneke improv & theatre and, as such, we all have this ‘insider’s knowledge’, this glimpse beyond the stage. It’s an uneasy feeling that’ll continue to haunt me across the night.

Off audience prompts, Lia bakes bread (shared with us near the end of the show), does a get ready with me (GRWM), donates to charity and frets about contacting Phoebe. Lia’s anxieties get worse and worse as we near the end of the show period – one does tend to spiral if they’ve been up the entire night – and she ends up destroying her room, pulling her bed onto the floor. I won’t spoil the ending of the show for you, but relationships are restored, and the sun does come up in the end.

Even in our darkest moments there’s always a new day.

The Night is Always Darkest is an incredibly audacious show. I will always give patronage to something that’s as bold and clever as this, and that takes this much effort. Performing for seven hours, solo, is not an easy task; and Lia should be proud of her time spent on stage, for this performance is incredibly revealing and brave. The set is gorgeous (Izzi Lao) – a full bedroom and lounge space with working lights, computer, and cooking equipment on stage – and the technical work is an absolute undertaking.

Campbell lets me poke my nose behind the scenes sometime between hour ??? and ??? The workflow for the technical side of things is super inspired and impressive. I also can’t even conceive how much went into the directorial (Rosie Glover) and production (Austin Harrison & Dylan Hutton) areas.  

Durational theatre is an experience that you truly don’t understand until you’ve been part of it. It becomes less a disparate theatre, performer and audience, more a world where we all meld together in the end. The fourth wall, if there was one, melts away entirely, as audience members pick up Lia’s nail polish colours and prompt her to pick a specific one.

In Lia’s insomnia we find our own.

I truly don’t know how much I liked this show. There was a lot of joy, a lot of hilarity, and a whole lot of moments that hit me hard in the chest. I was so tired that I was seeing things by the end, and it’s taken me such a long time to unpack the experience that this review is coming out ten days after the fact.

Time grew softer, in that performance space. Edges melted away from things. The experience felt somehow longer and shorter than it was. You gain a different perspective on people you know when you’ve seen how they are at four am.

Though I can’t exactly place my feelings on a scale, The Night is Always Darkest is a vital theatrical experience. It’s one that I’m certain will change across its iterations, but at its core it is something you’ll be thinking about long after being a part of it. There’s no more effective, moving theatre than that.

[It happens once more, but differently, from 11.59pm on Saturday 8 March: https://tickets.fringe.co.nz/event/446:6208/446:23874/ – ED]

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer