sfx54585Hud­son & Halls Live!‘s Wel­ling­ton sea­son at the Han­nah Play­house began with an ush­er  wel­com­ing crowds to the per­form­ance, assur­ing them the theatre had been cer­ti­fied quake-safe, and explain­ing that some years after the time in which the play was set, one of the prot­ag­on­ists would die of can­cer and the oth­er would take his own life.

 

It’s an odd way to begin a show dis­tin­guished begin­ning to end by a joy­ous, upbeat chaos of liv­ing. The play con­jures the daggy semi-pro­fes­sion­al­ism of 1980s NZ stu­dio tv to retell the onscreen love affair of chefs Peter Hud­son and Dav­id Halls. The pair’s slap­stick cel­eb­ra­tion of kiwi-kit­chen haute cuisine invig­or­ated the air­waves and breathed heli­um into the staid tv cook­ing-show milieu.

 

Invok­ing its era fre­quently, the show’s shame­less delight in nos­tal­gia plays well into the campy verve of its prot­ag­on­ists. The Wel­ling­tonista is (tonight) young enough not to have been famil­i­ar with Hud­son and Halls’ real-life schtick; but the gusto with which the duo – bitchy, bick­er­ing, fre­quently sozzled – forced soph­ist­ic­a­tion into the microwaves of middle New Zea­l­and isn’t under­stated onstage.

 

Hud­son and Halls’ obvi­ous romantic love for one anoth­er was, per­haps sur­pris­ingly, not a prob­lem for their ador­ing main­stream audi­ence; at half­time, the couple beside The W wondered aloud wheth­er, Queer Eye-style, Hud­son and Halls’ homo­sexu­al­ity onscreen was accep­ted so far as it was shown in a suf­fi­ciently self-lam­poon­ing con­text. (This in turn plays into the oft-lamen­ted tend­ency for queer char­ac­ters onscreen to meet with tra­gic fates). Hud­son & Halls Live!‘s deft answer to this is to punc­tu­ate the onscreen shenanigans with behind-the-scenes inter­ludes hint­ing at the lim­it­a­tions placed upon the duo by their era.

 

Hud­son & Halls Live! at Han­nah Play­house to 10 Dec.