Cir­ca One has been turned into a man-cave, com­plete with a nude cal­en­dar — per­ma­nent­ly set to July — a fridge full of beers and a Ryobi pow­er drill for The Pink Ham­mer, being per­formed until ear­ly Octo­ber. The show itself is a cri­tique of Kiwi mas­culin­i­ty (of a sort), a bit of fem­i­nist fun (of a sort), and in-all just a very good time.

Ginette McDon­ald plays Helen, a hard-nose horse breed­er, who has come to the work­shop for a Pink Ham­mer class — teach­ing women con­struc­tion along­side empow­er­ing them, or at least that’s what the brochure says. She’s joined by Louise (Anne Cham­ber­lain), Siob­han (Har­ri­et Preb­ble) and Annabel (Bron­wyn Turei), who each have their own rea­sons for being at the class.

Which is when all things go a lit­tle bit wrong.

Mag­gie, the teacher of the class, has run off with their pre-paid course fees, and her hus­band Woody (Alex Greig), who does­n’t know much about teach­ing class­es, let alone the empow­er­ment of women, becomes rather oblig­ed to teach the class­es him­self.

It’s the stan­dard “five peo­ple in a room, all whom are snip­py with each oth­er” schtick, but giv­en a bit of a fresh twist. It’s inter­est­ing to hold a mir­ror up to what we per­ceive as the ’empow­er­ment of women’ and see it exam­ined in such a way.

Are the four women, being taught by Woody (who is, nar­ra­tive­ly speak­ing, a bit of a dick) being empow­ered in their work at the end of the piece? I don’t know, but they end up mak­ing a pret­ty darn swell cof­fin, and some strong friend­ships along the way.

While all the actors were incred­i­bly strong in this piece, and brought incred­i­ble lay­ers to very tricky char­ac­ters, I espe­cial­ly enjoyed Har­ri­et Preb­ble as Siob­han. Car­ry­ing on with her boss, a mar­ried man, this char­ac­ter’s a lit­tle moral­ly dubi­ous but ulti­mate­ly very lik­able. Preb­ble brings a kind­ness to the char­ac­ter, a gen­uine heart, and her singing dur­ing one part of the play is just love­ly.

I’d also like to make men­tion of the excel­lent set design, by Daniel Williams, which melds all the best parts of a tool­shed into an appro­pri­ate stage-based set­ting; dusty doors, a litany of tools, and a beer fridge that is not quite big enough. Tony Black adds an utter­ly gor­geous light­ing design to the mix, which has some stun­ning ear­ly-morn­ing and late-night states, and real­ly helps con­tribute to the whole man-cave ‘feel’.

The Pink Ham­mer is undoubt­ed­ly a com­e­dy, but it’s not afraid to dip into the melan­cholic occa­sion­al­ly, to great results. As an audi­ence mem­ber, my per­spec­tive on some of the char­ac­ters flip-flopped mul­ti­ple times dur­ing the piece — at points I’d side with them, at oth­ers I could­n’t — and I think that’s the sign of real­ly well-writ­ten char­ac­ters, allow­ing view­ers to dis­cov­er and gain new per­spec­tives as the sto­ry unfolds.

While the end­ing of the play does come on a lit­tle sud­den, and I’d have loved for there to be less time jumps, The Pink Ham­mer does what you’d expect — it’s a very fun­ny time with peo­ple in a tool­shed, and you might just learn some­thing about con­struc­tion along the way.

 

The Pink Ham­mer is on at Cir­ca The­atre in Welling­ton until the 5th of Octo­ber, 2019.