Jamie McCaskill in plaid shirt for The moa showThe Junc­tion Hotel is pub in rur­al Thames. It’s fair­ly typ­i­cal– a bar, a dart board, a smok­ing area, the reg­u­lars. There’s Hen­ry Hikoi from Ngati Pukeko, Bri­an Tritt who’s in every day, and Carmichael. When the three of them start drink­ing togeth­er and talk­ing about the moa in the hills they wake up in a very strange place. Then every­thing goes a bit weird…

Jamie McCaskill is the solo per­former in this ‘sur­re­al adult adven­ture sto­ry.’  He cre­ates clear­ly defined char­ac­ters with their own man­ner­isms and voic­es. This is impor­tant as there’s quite a bit of fast paced char­ac­ter chang­ing. The script devised by McCaskill and Direc­tor Craig Geen­ty is fun­ny, absurd, and deft­ly avoids a sen­ti­men­tal end­ing by keep­ing the char­ac­ters real. It also includes ref­er­ences to nar­cotics and inap­pro­pri­ate bird/human inter­ac­tion.

A fun start to the Com­e­dy Fes­ti­val.