It’s strange to be back in a place like BATS dur­ing times like these, but I’m very pleased I went along to see PLAY, a gay dat­ing dram­edy here from Auck­land.

It’s a play with­in a play, of a sort – the first twenty minutes or so being a form of a draw­ing-room com­edy, then the show takes an abrupt dip into real­ism (of a sort), explor­ing the life of the writer writ­ing said com­edy.

The per­form­ances are excel­lent, and the show is very well dir­ec­ted. The act­ors cap­ture the space, mak­ing their three-per­son show feel a lot lar­ger than life, and it’s incred­ibly funny.

The first por­tion of the play is set in mod­ern-day city life, but the per­formers speak as though they’re with­in an Aus­ten nov­el, which leads to many excel­lent quips, and quite a lot of euphem­isms for one’s… shall we say… john­son? I was cry­ing with laughter, let me tell you.

The second part of the show is a lot closer to home, a world that one could eas­ily walk past on any of Wel­ling­ton’s streets. Rich (Alex Walk­er) is writ­ing a play about a mar­ried man who cheats on his hus­band with a waiter. All things feel per­haps a smidge too close to home as he’s torn between Dan (Zak Enay­at), an artist, and Nick (Liam Cole­man) a realtor, both of whom he def­in­itely cares for, but he can­’t quite settle for either.

PLAY is an inter­est­ing fos­sick­ing around of polyamory, open rela­tion­ships, love and com­mit­ment. Though the end­ing was per­haps a little tele­graphed and did­n’t quite feel sat­is­fact­ory, I had a lovely time. Sup­port shows like this, they’re worth it.

PLAY is on at BATS Theatre in Wel­ling­ton until the 12th of Septem­ber. There are lim­ited seats avail­able for two of the per­form­ances, so get in quick!