Stand up love 

Freddy is a comedi­an and has a drink­ing prob­lem. Ana wants him to stop. Their rela­tion­ship has prob­lems but they love each oth­er. Isn’t that enough?

I find the messy set – a bed with a couch backed on to the bed­head plus liv­ing items strewn around – appeal­ing, reflect­ing as it does the messy lives of the char­ac­ters. Jonny Potts makes a pass­able drunk (pas­sout-able?) and is pretty good at show­ing the com­pul­sion for push­ing oth­er people away which is a fea­ture of his char­ac­ter. Rachel Baker is self con­tained in her por­tray­al of Ana. This works espe­cially well in the final scenes.  How­ever she seems to swal­low her words some­times so even though I’m sit­ting close to the front I miss sev­er­al of her lines. I like the dir­ec­tion by Adam Goodall – the space is used well, and the moments when the char­ac­ter con­nect are more poignant for the moments when they don’t. Unfor­tu­nately I’ve rather lost my appet­ite for love-should-be-enough-scripts so while the writ­ing is smart and the per­form­ances good, I’m mostly dis­con­nec­ted from the whole thing. (For the oppos­ite view please see this review from Wel­ling­ton Reviews. I love that two so totally dif­fer­ent exper­i­ences can be had from the same show.)

Wine Lips

Brit vis­its her ex-boy­friend Scotty back­stage while he’s work­ing a show. She brings the wine, he brings the unpleas­ant memor­ies.

Tom Clarke and Karin McCrack­en have a lovely rap­port and it’s easy to believe their char­ac­ters were once togeth­er. Clarke as Scotty rushes about the stage, always smil­ing, put­ting a pos­it­ive spin on things – at least at the start. McCrack­en as Brit is more hes­it­ant, almost vis­ibly steel­ing her­self to be more con­fid­ent in the face of Scotty’s energy. The script has them need­ling at each oth­er in good fun and then tip­ping over into not so much fun. I start to worry halfway through if this is too theatre spe­cif­ic but as the show goes on I real­ise it could apply to any rela­tion­ship between two people which has broken apart.  While they are work­ing out how to relate to one anoth­er again, anoth­er char­ac­ter is work­ing it on stage. Jac­ob Brown is Max, the per­former ‘onstage’. Max rep­res­ents Scotty and Brit in their early years of work­ing in theatre – enthu­si­ast­ic, will­ing to work long hours and per­form in little known shows. Snip­pets of the onstage show blare out from the back­stage speak­er, usu­ally her­ald­ing Brown’s fren­et­ic dash back­stage (onstage). Brown is won­der­fully wide eyed in con­trast to the oth­er char­ac­ters cyn­icism and provides some light relief while we wait to dis­cov­er what went wrong in Brit and Scotty’s rela­tion­ship. Stella Reid’s dir­ec­tion is excel­lent, ensur­ing that while the stage is busy we nev­er lose track of what is going on.

 

Ngā mihi to Mak­ing Friends Col­lect­ive for includ­ing con­tact details for a couple of sup­port organ­isa­tions in the pro­gramme for this well presen­ted double bill. They write “These plays depict char­ac­ters that exper­i­ence the emo­tion­al stresses, neg­li­gence and many oth­er con­sequences of bad rela­tion­ships. As a res­ult, these plays include poten­tially dis­turb­ing con­tent.” It’s a pos­it­ive move for audi­ence con­fid­ence that com­pan­ies present­ing work of this nature recog­nise that it may be dis­tress­ing for some.