Auckland Theatre Company’s latest production provides its audience with the opportunity to see two well known Kiwi stage divas perform side by side in one of history’s most famous high stake family feuds of all time. Mary Stuart, rich with themes of religious fanaticism and political corruption, is a dramatised interpretation of the struggle that Mary, Queen of Scots faced while trying to fight for her freedom from Queen Elizabeth I.

Originally written over 200 years ago, Friedrich Schiller’s historical drama was translated and adapted by Peter Oswald before being directed by Colin McColl.

Overall, Mary Stuart is quite a phenomenal piece of theatre. It is a study of entrapment that is both moving and intensely dramatic. Elizabeth Hawthorne delivers an arresting and truly captivating performance as Queen Elizabeth I. Watching Elizabeth remain dignified and in control in the face of magnificent inner conflict and torment, while never emotionally unravelling or surrendering is riveting. Mary by contrast is a wildly passionate, barefooted sensualist who commands the stage and is depicted with ease by Robyn Malcolm. Malcolm’s portrayal of the anger and despair that Mary experiences while ‘bricked up alive’ is heart wrenching and even more so is her flickering belief that Elizabeth may grant her survival. The skilful balance of the parallel tragedies of the two queens effectively evokes pathos, making Mary Stuart’s audience feel sympathetic for the two women stuck in a man’s world, which I believe is the emotional key to a successful retelling of the story.

With Mary and Elizabeth rarely being seen on stage together, it’s no surprise that the highlight of the performance is the scene in which they meet (a meeting which never actually took place) and it was this moment that managed to provide me with a visual that has stuck in my brain for days. Watching Mary on her knees begging Elizabeth to release her from imprisonment before verbally lashing her with impassioned dialogue, while Elizabeth’s advisors watch silently from the shadows is both intense and unforgettable. This scene is powerful, visually stunning and displays the superb acting abilities of both Hawthorne and Malcolm.

A few among the supporting cast stand out. Understated actress Hera Dunleavy is endearing as Mary’s nurse, Hanna and Stuart Devenie is spot on in the role of Lord Burleigh. Besides an incredible cast, McColl’s vision is strongly supported by John Parker’s innovative set design, Phillip Dexter’s elegant lighting and Elizabeth Whiting’s stellar creative costume design.

While it’s a fairly solid production, I think there are a few elements that let Mary Stuart down. My primary gripe is the character of Mortimer. I felt Mortimer’s motivation came across a little too much like a lovesick psycho rapist, instead of a youthful and spontaneous noble who has converted to Catholicism in the hopes of saving the Queen. There were also times when I was a little confused by costume choices.

Mary Stuart is, above all, an extraordinary showcase of the talents of Hawthorne and Malcolm, as well as the directing abilities of Colin McColl. It’s on at the Maidment Theatre until 25 June (www.atc.co.nz).

To be published in Express Magazine shortly..

Nine times out of ten when I go and watch a show, it always begins the same. I enter the theatre. I see the stage. I am ushered to my allocated seat. I sit quietly in the dark and watch the show from the safety of behind the fourth wall. Entering the venue for I Won’t be Happy Until I Lose one of my Limbs was like nothing I had ever experienced.

I’m pretty sure I gasped when I first stepped foot in the theatre because I was so overwhelmed by what I saw (and also overwhelmed by the fact that some adorable girl was giving out ice creams to the audience!). The stage is a wonderland and is so busy that at first you don’t know where you’re allowed to sit. 

Written by Julie Hall and directed by Andrew Foster, I Won’t Be Happy Until I Lose One of My Limbs reminds me of Lars Von Trier’s film Dogville on vast amounts of acid. It’s avant-garde, bizarre, absurd darkly funny and incredibly weird. In other words, I loved it. The story revolves around artist O’Gradient (played by former Shortland Street actress Nisha Madhan), who believes that losing her leg will solve all her problems. Madhan and fellow actor Gareth Reeves play six characters between them, which is executed in an incredibly clever and entertaining way, which I found a little reminiscent of Brecht. All six characters share a common goal – the desire to be happy but how they all go about achieving that throughout the duration of the play differs greatly.

If you want to be privy to some engaging, original theatre, check out I Won’t Be Happy Until I Lose One of My Limbs. It’s playing at The Basement until the 19^th of February. Get your tickets from www.buytickets.co.nz.

 As published in Express Magazine.

My vagina’s angry. It is. It’s pissed off. My vagina’s furious and it needs to talk. It needs to talk about all this shit. It needs to talk to you.

Five actresses sat on chairs dotted across the front of a dark minimal set and delivered arresting personal stories about their pussies. Love it or hate it, I’m talking about Eve Ensler’s internationally acclaimed play The Vagina Monologues. The production I saw was directed by Caroline Bell-Booth and featured five of the rotating line up of 20 women. Spaced in between the monologues were a buttload of vox pops featuring a heap of famous NZ faces telling the world what their pussies smell like, what kind of clothes it would wear and all that kind of crap. It was cute but it was slightly alarming hearing Judy Bailey inform us that her crotch smells like a seafood bouquet (‘fish… and lilacs’). Yum.

I was honestly overwhelmed by the talent of the actresses. All of the women had an excellent grasp on their accents and knew their monologues well. My award for greatest delivery of a vagina monlogue was Michele Hine’s ‘Reclaiming Cunt’ rant. The piece involved Hine illustrating the word ‘cunt’ as a positive word, despite its constant negative connotations. The reason this performance won my heart was not because the narration involved a hot cougar writhing around a bare stage screeching the word ‘Cunt’ (believe it or not). It was the awesome delivery of this monologue that proved the amazing extent of Hine’s skill as an actress (and also Bell-Booth’s directing skills!). In a practically empty black room, a tiny woman managed to captivate an entire audience and fill a whole room with herself by creatively using her body and without just raising her voice. I haven’t had the pleasure of watching an actress in years who has been able to do that. I LOVE YOU, MICHELLE HINE.

Although I enjoyed the play and was entertained, there was also bits I didn’t like but that comes down to the play itself and not the directing or acting. I found the balance between the brutal sex encounters compared with the consensual or positive sex experiences to be really off balance and I wasn’t a fan of the negative portrayal of male-female sexual relationships. It also kind of shit me how 80% of the time when the play said ‘vagina’, it actually meant ‘vulva’.
 
I personally didn’t go away from the play learning anything new but I do strongly believe that The Vagina Monologues is a play that everyone should definitely see once. While the play is neither great art nor great feminism, it’s still a big step in the right direction!

As published in Express

When I was told that I was going to view and review a gay cabaret, I was totally expecting my eyes to be raped with sleazy, negative reinforcements of gay stereotypes, but guess what? My eyes remained unraped! Instead, I was verbally snuggled and stroked by a quartet of four hot gays who sang & spoke heartbreakingly sweet songs and words about coming out, breaking up and everything in between.
 
Performed in the intimacy of the Limelight Theatre, watching Songs for Guy was an excellent way to spend the evening. The stories are those of ordinary gay New Zealander’s lives, presented amongst a beautiful selection of world famous love songs and show tunes. Paul Barrett has done an amazing job with the music as has Kip Chapman with the smooth directing.
 
Todd Emerson, Andrew Laing and Stephen Butterworth’s performances were awesome; polished, yet very natural; and their voices, although different, harmonised well with each other. The actors personalities seemed to gel really well together on stage.
 
I’m not much of a crier, especially during live performance but Emerson’s performance of ‘Run Away With Me’ absolutely broke and shattered my tiny heart into a million ‘I remember feeling like that’ pieces and the sheer sadness I felt, nearly reduced me to ugly crying. I swear I cried more tears during that single song than I drank wine that night.
 
The greatest thing about this show is that you don’t have to only be a gay dude to enjoy it (anyone with feeling with get something out of it!) AND there must be thousands of interesting gay guy stories floating around New Zealand just waiting to be turned into Songs for Guy’s second chapter…
 
Now I’m going to go and grow moustache in attempt to seduce Stephen Butterworth.

As published in Express

I don’t know why I was so looking forward to seeing Liberace: Live From Heaven. It’s not as if I am a huge Liberace fan. Truth be told, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about the man or his music. Maybe I was excited about seeing it because the leading man Bobby Crush looks so comically homo in the advertising. Seriously! That creepy grin fuck he’s got going on! That leering over the grave stone pose! Something about that weird advert reached out to me, grabbed me by the left tit and screamed, ‘You’ll probably enjoy this’.
 
But I didn’t.
 
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if it was shit. It just wasn’t ‘the shit’. Written and directed by Julian Woolford, Liberace: Live from Heavenis set outside Pearly Gates where camp pianist Lee Liberace is waiting for St Peter (voiced by Stephen Fry) to decide whether to send him to heaven or hell. The one-man show is a weirdly camp mixture of biography, cabaret, pantomime and heinous sequinned fashion crimes.
 
There’s no denying that Bobby Crush is a big gay god on a piano but I felt his acting style to be awkward and nowhere near as entertaining as his piano playing. The show was pretty light hearted and a lot of the time I felt like I was being read a Wikipedia entry about Liberace’s life with some musical interludes to break up the bore (harsh but true). I found the stage and AV design to be pretty naff and a little ‘high school play’ esque. Definitely not what I was expecting from a ‘hilarious, critically acclaimed, West End Music Comedy Hit’ being performed at the Skycity Theatre.
 
I’m probably not going to see it again.

Published in Express Magazine

I was pretty much shitting my pants with excitement over the world premiere of New Zealand based horror director David Blyth’s latest creation, Wound. With having heard the film described as a ‘shocking supernatural tale of mental illness, bondage, incest, revenge and explicit graphic violence’, how could I not be excited? What also lured me in was the fact that Wound was described as ‘a shocking film piece’. Yes, the film definitely was shocking but in a ‘I am shocked that this is such horse shit’ kind of way. Awkward.

Before you get up on your high (pretentious) horses and fire bomb my house, you should probably know that I didn’t dislike the film for the reasons everyone else probably does. The penis slaughtering didn’t offend my sensibilities. The mask-wearing writhing bodies that erupted out of a volcano-sized vagina didn’t sicken me. Watching a fat man in a pig mask rape an unconscious girl didn’t make me feel uncomfortable (just kidding, I’m pretty sure the lingering shot of his tattooed ass thrusting away was probably a little awkward for everyone). None of this shocked me. I actually laughed (probably a result of too much B grade cult gore). It was so refreshing to see outrageous and grotesque home grown cinema.

This being said, the film is still crap, which is disappointing because there are some really fucking creative ideas hidden in there that should have been elaborated on. It feels as though the writer just sat down and said, “I’m going to write a story about a woman’s horrible struggle with mental illness, then I’m going to make a list of a tonne of things that are weird and will shock people and then I’m going to throw all of this in a big fat pretentious blender and produce something so far out and nonsensical that it will make a David Lynch film look like a romantic comedy”. But it’s not all bad. Kate O’Rourke’s performance as Susan is really something special; both brave and believable.

Please don’t hate me for writing this, David Blyth. I’m glad you’ve made the film you wanted to make and I can definitely appreciate the fact that you’re making work that’s challenging the censorship laws. I really wanted to enjoy Wound but it just really wasn’t my cup of blood.

Published in Express Magazine.

The $26.8 million theatre could be built on the site of Moana Fisheries in Halsey St and add a night-time attraction to a new family-friendly revitalisation of Jellicoe St and the historic North Wharf promenade.

Auckland Theatre Company general manager Lester McGrath said the plan was still at the “idea stage”, although the company has received strong backing from the bank and PricewaterhouseCoopers has produced a business case for the project.

The city’s leading theatre company is running out of venues. The likely loss of the SkyCity Theatre, which is to be turned into a cabaret space or sports theatre, will leave a gaping hole in venues for the performing arts.

Mr McGrath said ASB had proposed building a 200-seat studio theatre into its new volcanic-cone-topped building on the corner of Halsey St and Jellicoe St, which it would make available to the theatre company.

The theatre group would build its own 600-seat theatre next door. The stage could open out to a public courtyard at ground level of the bank building.

Auckland Theatre would run the two venues, which could be used by other performing arts groups, such as Black Grace dance company and emerging theatre organisations, he said.

Mr McGrath said the company would like to secure a commercial lease for the Moana Pacific site with Auckland Regional Holdings – the commercial arm of the Auckland Regional Council overseeing development of the Tank Farm – and planned to establish a charitable trust to raise the $26.8 million.

The company appeared before Auckland City Council’s arts, culture and recreation committee last week and asked for a $5 million grant. Officers are due to report to the committee in August.

Auckland Theatre has used the 700-seat SkyCity Theatre twice a year for its more popular plays, staging more serious work at the 440-seat Maidment Theatre.

An Auckland City Council report in 2008 identified the need for a 600-seat theatre.

The $21 million flexi-form Q Theatre project, under way behind the Auckland Town Hall, will have seating for 350 to 460 people.

By Bernard Orsman

(Via www.herald.co.nz)

After reading that Skycity was tightening its reins on what kind of performances they would allow, I had wondered what the Auckland Theatre Company would do. Sure, they still have the Maidment and Q Theatre will be ready to roll in 2011 but it seemed a shame to lose such a big, prestigious venue (that being said, I hate the venue).

Although it’s only in it’s early stages, I have a great feeling about ATC starting their own theatre. It’s a brave move but we can never have enough theatres in Auckland. I just want to know how the interior is going to look already, dammit!

Although I generally prefer my theatre to have a little more meat to its bones, sometimes it’s nice to watch a show purely for the value of entertainment. The Auckland Theatre’s Company latest creation, Stepping Out (written by Richard Harris and directed by Colin McColl) does just that. It entertains. And boy does it do it well.

Starring the likes of Suzanne Paul, Sandra Rasmussen, Michelle Leuthart (HOT!) & Hera Dunleavy (among others), Stepping Out is a play about a bunch of amateurs who gather weekly in a local community hall to learn the art of tap dance. Far from skilled, the ladies (and one very awkward sweatpants-wearing man) dance purely for fun of it, until they learn they have the opportunity of a lifetime – to perform live in front of thousands at ‘Christmas in the Park’. The show is hilarious, touching and incredibly camp. What’s not to love about that?

I’m not usually a huge fan of the Skycity theatre venue (because it lacks the intimacy that I prefer to experience during a show) but I thought Stepping Out worked incredibly well in the space. I think that it was also due to the awesome stage design and the clever ways that the space was lit up. I appreciated the minor but thoughtful details that made the whole shebang more believable. For example, I felt the fluorescent lights and the community noticeboard were a nice touch. McColl’s directing was spot on; with the actors making great use of the space and levels where necessary and Sandra Rasmussen (who played the group’s teacher), did a flawless job with choreographing.

I won’t give away the ending but I will say that the last ten minutes of the show are comic genius. I laughed until my stomach hurt (and then I laughed some more). The choreography. The lighting. The costumes. The design. The acting. Everything meshed together perfectly. If I had to sum up the ending in two words? ‘Single Ladies’. Loved it!

Stepping Out is definitely worth dragging your ass off the couch to see. I fully enjoyed it and am already looking forward to Auckland Theatre Company’s next show (Cabaret. Eve Gordon  sporting little more than tassles? I’m so there). In true ATC style, the show is entertaining, well directed and designed, professional and well, Suzanne Paul in a leotard – who doesn’t want to see that?

The show is touring around various theatres in Auckland from now until August 7th, so be sure to check out ATC’s website (www.atc.co.nz) to check out what dates suit you. Take your mum! She’ll love it. 

Review to be published in Express Mag (June 2010).