Face of a pale fabric doll with long brown hair‘Peggy Pick­it Sees the Face of God’ by Roland Schim­melp­fen­nig is open­ing at Circa Theatre next week. A New Zea­l­and premiere appro­pri­ate for our mod­ern lives, this play exam­ines colo­ni­al­ist atti­tudes over freshly baked bread, and dis­cusses quar­ant­ines and vac­cin­a­tions while shar­ing drinks – it’s irony, of a sort. Are we doing enough to help those who are less for­tu­nate? When is phil­an­thropy just for self-grat­i­fic­a­tion? Is it up to us to care? 

The show explores two couples meet­ing up after six years apart for one extraordin­ary but chal­len­ging din­ner party. Work­ing in med­ic­al clin­ics on oppos­ite sides of the globe – Mar­tin and Car­ol in the devel­op­ing world, Liz and Frank in the west – the couples find they have changed more than they real­ised dur­ing their time spent apart and their secrets begin to emerge. There’s adul­tery in medi­cine, and loss too, and the char­ac­ters grate up against one-anoth­er, too dis­tant to com­pletely get along, but too sim­il­ar to dis­agree. This com­edy plays with themes of colo­ni­al­ism and rela­tion­ships, and how what we don’t say is just as import­ant as what we do. Truth flows freely with wine, but so do secrets.

Dir­ect­or Giles Bur­ton speaks on what inter­ested him about the play, “I think it is the com­bin­a­tion of the sub­ject and the excit­ing way that the writer tells the story. By break­ing the even­ing down into short bursts, replay­ing and hav­ing the char­ac­ters com­ment­ing on their actions Schim­melp­fen­nig allows us to see peoples’ thoughts and motives from dif­fer­ent per­spect­ives, we may think we have a handle on some­thing but a moment later we are shown it in a dif­fer­ent light.” 

Dir­ec­ted by Giles Bur­ton (The Ugly One, The Man Who Was Thursday), set design from the amaz­ing Debbie Fish (Burn Her) and fea­tur­ing a fant­ast­ic cast of Patrick Dav­ies (Scar­lett and Gold, A Ser­vant of Two Mas­ters), Rebecca Park­er, Fin­gal Pol­lock (Femme Nat­ale) and Gav­in Ruther­ford (Daf­fodils, Top of the Lake).