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.