A selection of reviews from Theatreview from the last week including 'Red' at the Maidment in Auckland, 'Five Women Wearing the Same Dress' at Fortune Theatre in Dunedin, 'Sheep' at BATS in Wellington and 'Flipside' at Centre Point in Palmerston North.

A selection of reviews from Theatreview from the last week including 'Red' at the Maidment in Auckland, 'Five Women Wearing the Same Dress' at Fortune Theatre in Dunedin, 'Sheep' at BATS in Wellington and 'Flipside' at Centre Point in Palmerston North.

See more recent reviews at http://www.theatreview.org.nz, the NZ Performing Arts Review & Directory

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Maidment, Auckland - RED: Powerful portrait of an abstract artist

- reviewed by Paul Simei-Barton

Fine collaboration gives Mark Rothko’s expressionist art the respect it deserve.

Rothko's luminous rectangles of pure colour represent a final stab at the modernist project of creating an art that would usurp the function of religion.

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Maidment, Auckland - RED: Engages the visceral and pits it against the mundane

- reviewed by Lexie Matheson

On the day James Wallace is named in the Queen’s Birthday honours list as a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit I sit down to review a play about artists, and, more specifically, a play that celebrates the life of a great painter as interpreted by one of our greatest actors.

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Fortune Theatre, Dunedin - FIVE WOMEN WEARING THE SAME DRESS: And now a toast to the bridesmaids

- reviewed by Barbara Frame

It was a common enough formula in the 70s and 80s: take a bunch of disparate women, plonk them down in a room, give them a few drinks and watch what happens.

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Fortune Theatre, Dunedin - FIVE WOMEN WEARING THE SAME DRESS: A charming, highly polished collaboration

- reviewed by Terry MacTavish

Not that I have ever believed that ‘theatricals’ are a bunch of shallow, self-serving luvvies, but this joint Fortune/Court production truly celebrates the unselfish idealism that can lie behind the old ‘show must go on’ slogan.

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BATS, Wellington - SHEEP: Of men, women, machines and sheep

- reviewed by Michael Wray

As playwright Arthur Meek himself describes it, Sheep combines moments of family history and national history. Seven separate short plays that can be taken in isolation form a collective story providing snapshots of both New Zealand’s development and the growth of the Prout / McMillan / Holt family tree that links New Zealand and Germany.

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Centrepoint, Palmerston North - FLIPSIDE: A wealth of understanding of human nature

- reviewed by John Ross

The deeply moving and fascinating saga of the ‘Rose-Noelle’, tells of how, back in 1989, four men survived in a flipped-over trimaran for 119 days, for much of the time crammed into a space no wider than a king-size bed, as their yacht drifted out into the Pacific and then, by means of a freakish El Nino current, drifted back to the New Zealand coast; of how they shiftingly related to, and ended up not loathing, each other.

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