A selection of reviews from Theatreview from the last week including: Live at Six, Abigail’s Party, and  Looking at Stuff in Clouds.

See more recent reviews at theatreview.org, the NZ Performing Arts Review & Directory.

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A selection of reviews from Theatreview from the last week including: Live at Six, Abigail’s Party, and  Looking at Stuff in Clouds.

See more recent reviews at theatreview.org, the NZ Performing Arts Review & Directory.

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The Basement, Lower Greys Ave, Auckland - ABIGAIL’S PARTY: A masterpiece of subtle realism
- reviewed by Stephen Lunt

At a glance, “The most painful hundred minutes in British comedy...” seems a strange quote to use to advertise a show. The reason for its choice becomes clear. The stellar performance of each cast member creates such a painful atmosphere, laughter is the only thing to cut it. Through this laughter, we become the sixth character, lifting the piece from a social documentary to a meticulously well-constructed masterpiece of painful comedy.

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The Basement, Lower Greys Ave, Auckland - ABIGAIL’S PARTY: Keep Calm and Party On
- reviewed by James Wenley

The promotional blurb has boldly led with the Channel 4 Quote that Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh is the “most painful hundred minutes of British comedy”. You can understand why. The guests of the party are hardly the type of people you’d otherwise willingly want to spend that amount of time with.

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Downstage - return season, Wellington - LIVE AT SIX: Topical, tight with sleek presentation
- reviewed by Laurie Atkinson

The late Sir David Frost once said that television enables you to be entertained in your home by people you wouldn’t have in your home. You certainly wouldn’t invite the Machiavellian lot presenting the news at TV1 News and 3News as depicted in Live at Six.

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The Basement, Lower Greys Ave, Auckland - LOOKING AT STUFF IN CLOUDS: One way of passing time
- reviewed by Matt Baker

Less a play and more a series of vignettes, the fourth production by Playfight, written and performed by co-founders Shoshana McCallum and Donna Brookbanks, is a self-proclaimed thought provoking commentary on the human condition in the naughties.

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The Basement, Lower Greys Ave, Auckland - LOOKING AT STUFF IN CLOUDS: Comedic study of human pretensions
- reviewed by Nik Smythe

There are many ironies exposed and examined within the ten short scenes that Playfight Productions’ newest original work comprises. To begin with, what would appear to be a simple, greatly entertaining flippant sketch comedy revue is in actuality a deceptively astute study in human pretensions as written and performed by Shoshona McCallum and Donna Brookbanks.

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Raye Freedman ARTS CENTRE, Gillies Avenue (Cnr Silver Road) Epsom, Auckland - KIWIANA: Relax and enjoy fresh perspectives
- reviewed by Jacqui Cesan

In a community where Hip Hop competition has often made this dance form into almost an exaggeration of itself through over the top energy and facial expression this show was a beacon of light and showed us that precision and intensity does not necessarily guarantee a connection between performer and audience. These dancers, all of them, connected with their audience through quality of movement and expression and their commitment to the ideas and each other.

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Maidment, Auckland - LORD OF THE FLIES: Careless anarchy of a modern school life sharply depicted
- reviewed by Paul Simei-Barton

William Golding's 1954 masterpiece is lodged within the psyche of generations who encountered it as a favoured school text. The novel offers an accessibly intelligent treatment of big themes and delivers a slap in the face to the romanticised view of childhood as a font of innate virtue.

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Maidment, Auckland - LORD OF THE FLIES: Boys own Apocalypse
- reviewed by James Wenley

Auckland Theatre Company’s stage production makes a nod to the usual medium the Lord of the Flies story is inherited: the secondary school classroom. A bookend, invented by Director Colin McColl and his cast, sets the leads as contemporary high-school students encountering William Golding’s 1954 novel. Project artwork of various pig heads, beasts and plane crashes dot the classroom wall. It doesn’t take long for the unsupervised boys to engage in stimulated sexual violence.

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BATS - Out Of Site - Cnr Cuba & Dixon, Wellington - JOSEPH K: Worlds out of kilter darkly amusing
- reviewed by Laurie Atkinson

The lack of height above the stage at Bats is turned into an asset. An attic-like room, in which the actors can never stand fully upright, underlines the absurdity of Joseph’s situation as well as the feeling of a world out of kilter. And it is our contemporary world that is out of kilter, not Kafka’s.

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Centrepoint, Palmerston North - REWENA: Vitality, personality, expressiveness, spot-on timing
- reviewed by John Ross

“Ka pai te rewena paraoa! Ka nui te pai!” The theatre-space, we find, on entering it, is Maggie's kitchen, and she is welcoming us in, as her guests, for a demonstration how to make rewena bread. Halfway through, one ‘guest’ gets recruited to help with kneading the dough, for one of the two loaves she's making.

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Old Boy’s Theatre, Christ’s College, Christchurch - LEO: The glorious anarchy of performance art
- reviewed by Lindsay Clark

By now happily into the swing of the Christchurch Arts Festival and with the collective appetite for adventurous stuff nicely primed, audiences experiencing this extraordinary piece of illusionist theatre are well served. For some it will raise the fascination of how the gravity-defying business is achieved, but for others, including myself, it is enough to let the magic have unreasoned momentum.

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Maidment, Auckland - LORD OF THE FLIES: A terrific world-class production
- reviewed by Stephen Austin

Everyone has studied William Golding’s Lord of the Flies at school – this is the thesis that initially brings us into this new Auckland Theatre Company production of Nigel Williams’ adaptation.

We’re introduced to the performers as modern school boys, lazily struggling to focus in class, listening to their teacher (Peter Daube) read from the Golding text. They’ve each been asked to bring an item that identifies themes of the work and so we are reminded of these familiar icons that we grew up studying in a similar environment – Piggy’s glasses, the pigs head, the knife, the spear – and that will inform the proceedings of this play.

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The Auckland Performing Arts Centre: TAPAC, Auckland - FINGERPRINTS: Courage, concentration, collaborative circus art
- reviewed by Felicity Molloy

Fingerprints is an important reflection of the need to support youth companies. The combined works for this show are an inspiration for young women to look more deeply at themselves and their enactment of a new generation. It is an extraordinary feat to make theatre work that fully understands the haziness and fragility of girls growing up and Fingerprints succeeds. Not only does the work show the courage of their explorations, the depth of their mentors, it also shows that the theatre is a perfect place to be.

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Paramount Theatre, Bergman Room, Wellington - PLAYSHOP LIVE: SUPERSCENE: Strange non-story made side-splittingly funny
- reviewed by Shannon Friday

The night starts with some improv games, familiar from Whose Line Is It Anyway. The games serve two purposes: we the audience get used to the idea of used to the idea of the actors making it up on the spot, and the actors get to check in with each other. Then the real work begins.

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Downstage - return season, Wellington - LIVE AT SIX: A splendidly successful play of ideas and personalities in a whirling moral universe
- reviewed by Michael Gilchrist

We are all doubled, we are all split. The old unities of thought and word, word and deed, deed and consequence are gone. We used to have to live with ourselves; now we have to live with our ‘selfie’. Our lives are transparent to others in ways that are translucent to ourselves.

What better setting in which to examine this dilemma than a TV newsroom?

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Meteor Theatre, Hamilton - JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR: Inventive, inspired, sensational
- reviewed by Jan Maree

Interestingly here is where I see the modern twist taken even further. In a stunning parallel to the evangelical style of religion preached by the likes of ‘Bishop’ Brian Tamaki, I get the sense that Judas (Joel Benjamin Hewlett) feels that Jesus has got a little too "me-me" and lost sight of the cause; that for Jesus the Christianity is only second to basking in the glory of his adoring followers, posing for photographs and back chatting the corporate baddies on his smart phone. Is it any wonder that Judas feels it appropriate to dob him in to said baddies?

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Aurora Centre, Christchurch - Canterbury - TRACES: A rare cool
- reviewed by Signe Uldall Wiingaard and Ben Kennedy

Each member has their own acrobatic performance and all leave their “trace”, but every member of the gang are always involved sewing the show together. The artists stay on stage casually sketching cityscapes on projectors, playing music and mischievously teasing one another enchanting the audience as they go. The real strength of the show lies in the acrobats’ charisma ad playfulness, and it is this that sets this performance apart from your usual Cirque de Soliel style show.

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