THE WITCHING HOURS 2020
BATS Theatre, The Random Stage, 1 Kent Tce, Wellington
27/10/2020 - 31/10/2020
Production Details
NEW EPISODES OF THE WITCHING HOURS – LIVE AND IN THE FLESH!
New episodes of cult favourite The Witching Hours are coming to life! There are nine new radio dramas for your dastardly delight in the lab right now, getting ready to be performed LIVE and in the flesh this Halloween, then released to the masses in the months that follow.
“Totally weird; strange and engaging” – Charlotte Simmonds, Theatreview
Your Snapper card is possessed and has a taste for blood! Siri is getting murderously envious of my relationship with Alexa. A sourdough starter has turned savage! There’s scalding magic in this tea… What has happened to the Starship Samurais? Oh, and the mayor is a monster. Literally!
A weird and wonderful project that brings the ridiculous creativity of radio drama recordings to a live studio audience.
Working on the project are no less than eighteen Aotearoa creatives who want this work accessible to all. The third season of The Witching Hours has expanded its writers room and features special episodes from writers in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin: Abby Howells is an award winning comedian and writer, a founding member of all-female comedy collective Discharge, and both the face and brains of smash-hit, multi award-winning solo show HarleQueen. Eamonn Marra is an author and stand-up comedian living in Pōneke. He has been published extensively and has performed in theatres and festivals across the country. His debut novel, 2000ft Above Worry Level, was published by Victoria University Press in February 2020 to rave reviews; has appeared on the Unity Books bestseller list and the Nielsen NZ Fiction bestseller list.
Emilie Hope is a recent Masters in Scriptwriting graduate from Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters. Her debut play Confessions with a Kangaroo was set to premiere at BATS Theatre this Autumn but was unable to go ahead due to lockdown. The Witching Hours will thus be Emilie’s first professional project after graduating. Jonny Potts has been the Narrator of The Witching Hours from the very beginning. Known for his stand-up work, apt comedic theatre, and most notably the timeless sensation Loose: A Private History of Booze and Iggy Pop, this will by Jonny’s firstWitching Hoursepisode written by himself. Meanwhile, Head Writer and cult phenomenon Uther Dean returns to spearhead the project!
Nine shockingly unique storylines with delicious horror-comedy tropes – from the odd to the gross, the fantastical and surreal, all intwined in the everyday.
The Witching Hoursfeatures live performed and recorded, out-of-this-world sound design by Oliver Devlin and Halloween spooktacular lighting design by Jennifer Lal. Each night will feature two local favourites in multiple roles, rounding out a star-studded five-night extravaganza of the most extraordinary kind.
Sound design and live foley by Oliver Devlin
at BATS Theatre
27 – 31 October 2020
(more details below)
Live performed episodes each night are:
TUESDAY 27TH OCTOBER
CYBER SPACE by Uther Dean
In a cyberpunk city of the dystopian future run by megacorporations, hard-bitten Vanya is a Hole Puncher – a mysterious role, beyond the government, above the police detective… Through one wild and weird night, she investigates a deadly, dangerous trade in the most valuable thing of all – physical space.
SOURDOUGH IT FOLLOWS by Eamonn Marra
Internet dating turns life and death as a killer infection travels from person to person, via… sourdough starter.
WEDNESDAY 28TH OCTOBER
HER RECENT PAST by Jonny Potts
When a killer dame walks into his life, a smooth-talking private detectice is sent on a spiralling journey into mysterious undiscovered places: First, in Wellington… Then inside his own mind.
WITCHES’ BREW by Emilie Hope
In 1902 France, Madeleine meets a talking bird called Magnus. Glaswegian rascal Magnus leads our plucky heroine to a mysterious old woman. Her name is Madame Clémence and the tea she serves them is positively enchanting.
THURSDAY 29TH OCTOBER
PODCAST by Uther Dean
Suck on My Lit is a bratty bodacious book club podcast where two #GirlBoss intellectuals with over three Spinoff by-lines between them read whatever the frak they want and then talk about it.
Their guest this week: A ghost detective. And the terrifying evil force he brought with him, of course.
THE CREATURE FROM THE LAKE, FOR THE PEOPLE by Abby Howells
In the sleepy ‘50s town of Hard Knocks, it looks like things couldn’t get any worse. And then a terrifying monster emerges from the lake. A monster who would soon be… their mayor?
FRIDAY 30TH OCTOBER
I THINK WE’RE ALONE NOW by Uther Dean
Sarah, a lonely quality assurance tech, installs an update to her smart home system Spencer. Spencer’s overactive programming causes him to fall obsessively, violently in love with her.
STAR BORES by Uther Dean
Captain Solaris of the Space Fleet the Spaceship Summarise is bored. Every week is another crisis and every week they fix it. Everything changes and then everything stays the same. Is there a sinister force at play? Or is this just what happens when your series… series of adventures go on too long?
SATURDAY 31ST OCTOBER
TRICK AND TREAT – A FEATURE-LENGTH HALLOWEEN SPOOKTACULAR!
A pair of teens plan a night of mischief for Halloween only to find that supernatural forces have other things in store for them. Bec and Pete are the lowest of the low at their high school and they have decided that Halloween night is precisely the right time to get back at everyone who has made their school lives hell. They’re gonna crash the toxic nerds’ DnD game. They’re gonna out the cheating jock to his girlfriend. Most importantly, they are gonna make sure that Jess Sampson regrets not inviting them to her notorious annual Halloween party!
But when they stumble across an arcane cult’s ritual, they accidentally release a horde of demons and ghosts of many different forms and shapes into the area. Now, in the midst of their own mischief, this merry band of nervy teens are the only people who can save the planet from some unspeakable horrors. This is gonna be one Halloween they never forget.
The Witching Hours 2020
BATS Theatre, the Random Stage
Tuesday 27th – Saturday 31st October
8.30pm
Tickets $25 full / $20 concession / $22 group 6+
Bookings from BATS Theatre // 04 802 4175
Theatre ,
1 hr
Creatives at the top of their game
Review by Melissa Bee 31st Oct 2020
From the moment the doors to the Random Stage open, the team from A Mulled Whine and My Accomplice beckons the audience to leave the warm embrace of the BATS theatre lobby and enter a place that straddles the line between the concrete and ephemeral.
The smoke machine should have been listed on the program for all the work it puts in throughout the evening; it leaves the audience in a literal haze as Sound/Score designer Oliver Devlin tinkers with the sound board amongst heaps of cans, props, and scripts. It looks like the eleventh hour of a marathon creative session and I couldn’t be more excited to see how the group brings Uther Dean’s words to life.
In tonight’s iteration of The Witching Hours, we get a double feature of short stories: ‘Star Bores’,a send-up of Star Trek that muses on repetitive programming, both in our lives and in the media we consume, and ‘Siri to Bother You’, a Black Mirror-esque peek into the moment when our home automation programs us.
The scripts entertain but do not tread any new creative ground. I am particularly tickled by the examples of outrageous possibilities in The Witching Hours intros (Ducks in a ZORB demolishing your home is a particular stand out) and a list of real and so-ridiculous-it-could-be-real television shows in ‘Siri to Bother You’. They suggest possibilities to expand the universe and add more humour to future productions.
Acushla-Tara Kupe and Paul Waggott bring top vocal talent to both pieces. Waggott nails the confident, brash Captain, taking equal cues from sci-fi classics and their numerous parodies. Kupe shines with her emotional range and vulnerability as Sarah, a programmer who uploads emotion into Spencer, a home automation device that proves that women can’t escape so-called ‘nice guys’ even when we try to program a better companion.
The star of the show is Oliver Devlin, surrounded by his table of wonders. He employs both high- and low-tech sound effects, much to the audience’s delight. Never before has eating toast been so entertaining.
The Witching Hours is a peek inside the recording studio, where the audience becomes a collective co-producer. Our presence adds to the creation of the work, even if it removes a sense of mystery from an audio-only experience. What magic you lose in seeing the process, you gain in the experience of witnessing a group of creatives at the top of their game.
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
Solid truths amongst the lols
Review by Ines Maria Almeida 29th Oct 2020
My date is always game for a wild Wednesday, which is why she’s always the perfect date. I’ve taken her to some real duds so I’m nervous when we enter the Random Stage at Bats, but with its foreboding purple lighting, eerie fairy lights, and smoke puffing out of a machine like a vaping hipster on Dixon St, I think, tonight I’ve done well.
We’re sitting here at 8.30pm, a full three-and-a-half hours earlier than the actual witching hour when witches are supposedly active. In fact, apparitional experiences and creepily felt presences are most common between 2 and 4am, corresponding with a 3am peak in the amount of melatonin in the body. But I digress.
The Witching Hours is Uther Dean’s latest production where he brings his cult classic radio dramas to life on the stage with the help of actors Freya Daly Sadgrove, and smooth-talking Ali Foa’i. Tonight, Dean is directing two stories: ‘Her Recent Past’, written by Jonny Potts (who also serves as the soothing narrator with a rather sexy made-for-radio voice), and ‘Witches’ Brew’, written by Emilie Hope – but not in that order. Both shows are comedies, but one is much funnier than the other. Not that it’s a competition.
Talking red birds with bang-on Scottish accents, saucy detectives, witches (of course) and deliberately terrible French accents bring the lols in this very full room. The loudest laughter comes from the director himself – but hey, don’t we all love to laugh at our own jokes?
Amongst the lols are some very solid truths: Yes, France was a brutal coloniser, the desire for vast wealth is often the undoing of many, women always pay for the bad deeds of men, and even as grown-ass adults, we still love the mood a smoke machine brings to a room. I make a note to look for one on TradeMe after the show (and I find one, a Party Fog Machine, for $75!).
Freya and Ali, the main actors, are solid, reading from the page like pros even if they butcher a language I love so much (this might be part of the horror), but the star of the show might surprise you. Oliver Devlin, master of sound and score, and sitting smack dab in the middle of the stage, exactly where he should be, makes the show come alive with all of his wondrous effects. The mad genius uses dry cleaning bags, tea slurps, ominous footsteps and yes, the sweet hiss of cracking open a LaCroix can to make the narrative really take off, and places the audience deep into the stories.
Shout out to the cheeky reference to Theatreview reviews – cheeky and ably done.
You can catch more of The Witching Hours on Thursday, Friday and Saturday this week at Bats. Go to one, or go to them all – each night is different. And if you really can’t make it, listen to past stories at thewitchinghours.com or in the podcast app you love.
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
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