The Wicked Winds of Wellywood
14/02/2025 - 08/03/2025
Production Details
Created by Emma Maguire
Tempest Theatre Co
Ashley Richardson was the writer of Wellywood’s hottest new international film – but now Ashley is dead. Plunge through the wicked winds of Wellywood to find the answers even the city’s best crime fighters couldn’t. Do you have what it takes to get justice?*
This is an unsolved case file. Pick your case notes, audio recordings, photos and newspaper clippings from [TBC LOCATION], or download them online once Fringe begins, get your mates together and solve this heinous crime!
*All events of this show are fictionalised, any resemblence to any person, place or circumstance is merely coincidental.
TBC
Multi-discipline , Multimedia , Theatre ,
About??? an hour?
Good idea needs more work to satisfy the real murder mystery audience
Review by James Redwood 07th Mar 2025
Emma Maguire is onto a winning idea here. The murder mystery audience is huge, and all of us in that audience want to be the detective. The more autistic of us want accuracy, detail and difficulty. Maguire delivers in a limited way on the first and the second, but does not deliver on the third. This idea needs work.
The concept is a cold case file being delivered to us for our analysis. We get to be the gumshoe doing the hard yards; spotting the holes in the statements, finding the clues in the evidence, nailing the bad guys to the wall.
As delivered, The Wicked Winds of Wellywood is essentially a written piece. There are some audio pieces – suspect interviews – by Maguire, Nino Raphael and Hamish Boyle, but the performance aspect is not a feature. The dialogue, both written and recorded, needs work to be convincing.
All of the material is delivered via a website, with printed versions available. The rest of the provided material in this production are written case notes, evidence records and photographs. These are more realistic than the audio, but are attenuated compared with reality, or compared with the average murder mystery novel.
The evidence we are given is enough to make the right conclusions, but that is part of the problem with this production. The answers are too obvious. Part of the reason for this is that the evidence we are given is not comprehensive. It is narrowed down for us. There are three stages to the story, and we are told after every stage what the conclusions we should have drawn thus far should be. We are told the answers.
This is not what a real murder mystery audience wants. At the same time it is too laborious for the average punter looking for entertainment. Maguire needs to lean in to the concept, and embrace the real audience for this idea.
Cain’s Jawbone, a mystery puzzle novel that I am yet to solve, is the benchmark for this concept. Giving the ‘police procedural’ audience the experience of doing the detecting themselves is a powerful drawcard. With more depth, and police consultation, Maguire may become New Zealand’s first successful proponent.
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