A selection of reviews from Theatreview from the last week including: God Versus the Mind Reader,  Revenge of the Amazons, and Motel.

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: God Versus the Mind Reader,  Revenge of the Amazons, and Motel.

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

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Ponsonby Baptist Church, 43 Jervois Road, Auckland - REVENGE OF THE AMAZONS: Good solid laughter and delicious cupcakes
- reviewed by Forrest Denize

Written by New Zealand playwright Joan Betts as a tongue-in-cheek, feminist, “somewhat revised” version of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Female Company’s Revenge of the Amazons – directed by Marisa Breytenbach and Haemia Foote – is a side-splitting success.

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The Basement, Lower Greys Ave, Auckland - MOTEL: Nothing cheap about motel-room script
- reviewed by Paul Simei-Barton

Playwright April Phillips has created a finely crafted script that serves up four vignettes on the unexpected encounters that can take place in the transient, anonymous and deeply revealing space of a cheap motel room.

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theSpace on the Mile, Edinburgh, Scotland - GOD VERSUS THE MIND READER: Learn a little about how little you’ve learnt
- reviewed by Robbie Nicol

The performance begins with Cairns choosing an audience member with a ball thrown behind his back and into the crowd. The audience member chooses two other volunteers, and they in turn choose more throughout the show. Each person seems to have complete control over the choices they make, and yet, in increasingly mysterious ways, Cairns predicts exactly how every person will behave.

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The Basement, Lower Greys Ave, Auckland - MOTEL: Smart, succinct and startling
- reviewed by Sharu Delilkan

How can anyone resist being a voyeur? That’s probably what everyone was thinking as they sat down to witness the shenanigans about to take place before their eyes in the seedy motel room presented on stage in front of them.

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The Basement, Lower Greys Ave, Auckland - MOTEL: Dramatic, comedic, honed, unexpected and sharp

- reviewed by Heidi North-Bailey

One room. Four stories. What could possibly go on behind those 2-star walls? There is a gristly delight in playing the voyeur, a fact which April Phillips’ clever new play exploits to delightful effect, enticing us be a fly on the wall in a 2-star motel in the back blocks of beyond.

We’ve all been guilty of imaging what other guests get up to in a night in a motel in the middle of nowhere – just what do ordinary people do when given the freedom of just passing through?

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Clarence Street Theatre, Hamilton - KISS THE FISH: Includes “the best theatre I have seen all year”
- reviewed by Mark Houlahan

The story is hard to summarise. In essence a contemporary development story entwines with a love and marriage story. Should Bapa sell the water source to a tourist development, and give up farming rice forever? But what would he then do? Eventually his children must decide, but to sell or not to sell divides them.

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Circa One, Wellington - THE PRICE: The Price worth the long preamble
- reviewed by Laurie Atkinson

Susan Wilson has triumphed yet again with a compelling production of an Arthur Miller play.

With The Price we are in familiar Miller territory: New York, sibling rivalry, the aftershocks of the Great Depression, American materialism and its corrosive effects on ordinary lives, the search for truth, and the destruction of illusions.

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Downstage Theatre, Wellington - LOVE AND MONEY: Sensuous, ribald, off-beat and great
- reviewed by Laurie Atkinson

Love & Money was given a right royal reception at Downstage on Friday night. It’s a sensuous, sometimes ribald, lively theatrical miscellany of cabaret, striptease, burlesque, comedy, documentary, revue, pop songs, dance, physical theatre, and exciting displays of various skills of contemporary circus.

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Various Fringe venues, Edinburgh, Scotland - EDINBURGH FRINGE WRAPS: Wrap #1: shows for the young
- reviewed by Robbie Nicol

Apparently the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is on the fringe of something, but you’d never know. With almost 2,500 shows on offer in 2013, a quarter of which are free, the Fringe has almost too much to offer. Comedy dominates slightly, but cabaret, dance, theatre, and music are hot on its heels. Not to mention the night-life (there is a thing called Hot Dub Time Machine and if you think it sounds fantastic, I can promise you it is even better than it sounds).

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Assemby, George Square, Edinburgh, Scotland - HAIRY MACLARY AND FRIENDS: Good old-fashioned fun
- reviewed by Robbie Nicol

Light, enjoyable and terribly British, Lynley Dodd’s iconic pup has been turned into the quintessential old-fashioned children’s show. The success of Nonsense Room’s production in tours across Australia, the UK and New Zealand is a testament to Dodd’s international success.

The theatre is packed with parents reading the picture books to their children and drinking wake-up coffees. More than any children’s show I have attended at the Fringe, I am distinctly aware that I am the only adult without a child. Nonsense Room seem to have sold the show as strictly a child’s affair, and the sales pitch is not a misrepresentation.

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Circa One, Wellington - THE PRICE: Highly credible and creditable

- reviewed by John Smythe

The late sixties saw the whole western world questioning its value systems ...
It was in this context that Arthur Miller wrote The Price, not about the baby boomer-led counter culture but questioning the values their parents were living by in the wake of two world wars and the Great Depression. Back then it may have been seen as the backstory to the socio-sexual revolution. Forty-five years on, following two more sharemarket crashes and in the context of a never-ending recession, the same questions arise: what are we doing with our lives and why?

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Playhouse, Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts, Hamilton - PLAYING MISS HAVISHAM: A delightful, gentle piece of theatre
- reviewed by Richard Howard

A woman in her late middle years, embroiled in the irritations and dissatisfactions of life as she now lives it, shares with the audience the contemplations of her life choices, the disappointments and the outcomes of her earlier life decisions.

Her only compelling ambition, it would seem, is to understand her quiet obsession with Miss Havisham and then ultimately to play this jilted, lost, decaying Dickensian character of Great Expectations who is emotionally stuck in time and place; in a living death arising from a single instance in her life of love betrayed, some 30 years prior.

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Downstage Theatre, Wellington - LOVE AND MONEY: Alignment of theatre and cabaret creates a better future for both
- reviewed by Maryanne Cathro

There are not enough adjectives to describe the experience that is Love and Money. Breathtaking, beautiful, funny and poignant come to mind, but somehow words lack the required dimensions.

Put simply, Dust Palace has created a show that combines their sexy circus/cabaret style with a narrative story about strippers.

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Q Theatre, Rangatira, Auckland - SYDNEY BRIDGE UPSIDE DOWN: Intriguing adaptation visually lush but adrift
- reviewed by Paul Simei-Barton

Taki Rua presents a boldly experimental piece of theatre that is as intriguing and idiosyncratic as the title, taken from a little-known book that has been acclaimed as a neglected classic of New Zealand literature.

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Q Theatre, Rangatira, Auckland - SYDNEY BRIDGE UPSIDE DOWN: Stylised, Sinister and Sexy: innovative theatre not to be missed
- reviewed by Sharu Delilkan

When I heard that David Ballantyne’s classic novel Sydney Bridge Upside Down was going to be staged by Taki Rua Productions I fought tooth and nail to get the chance to review this iconic New Zealand piece. But in retrospect I may have been a little bit too hasty as the show that unfolded was rather cryptic, making the task of reviewing rather daunting.

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

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