Open­ing last night at Circa Theatre SolOTHELLO, is a riot­ous one man retell­ing of Shakespeare’s Oth­ello. (An unof­fi­cial Brit­ish Coun­cil rep­res­ent­at­ive described it as the first time he’s seen Oth­ello  per­formed as stan­dup com­edy.) The mix of ori­gin­al text, Te Reo Māori, col­lo­qui­al Eng­lish, and styl­ised move­ment used by the four char­ac­ters con­veys the essence of the story. Out­rageously funny scenes are bal­anced by the quieter ones with the end­ing being par­tic­u­larly power­ful. Per­former Regan Taylor has the audi­ence in the palm of his hand the whole way through – espe­cially when it looks as though he’s out of con­trol. Out­stand­ing.

Also open­ing this week was Tiki tour at BATS. Anoth­er great com­edy solo per­form­ance in which Kura For­res­t­er  plays six dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters who meet each oth­er when they’re on a tiki tour of Europe.  For­res­t­er does an excel­lent job of dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing the char­ac­ters with Bron­son Atar­angi (our main storyteller) and Zsu­z­anna (who doesn’t speak Eng­lish and mainly com­mu­nic­ates through smil­ing) being the two char­ac­ters I’d like to see more of. It’s a little uneven with some of the scenes too long and some too short for my lik­ing but is also full of laughs.

Con­tinu­ing at BATS this week  is The Vul­tures.  This is the word­i­est and most polit­ic­ally poin­ted of these three shows. It’s witty and amus­ing with beau­ti­ful cos­tum­ing and a cool tilted set which the cast play around on. Led by fine per­form­ances by Awhina Rose Ashby and Car­rie Green as sis­ters on oppos­ite sides of the decision that has to be made about fam­ily land the rest of the cast (Hine Para­ta-Walk­er, Natano Keni, Tola New­berry) hold their own as the plot thick­ens around them. Scar­ily famil­i­ar to some in the audi­ence with one jok­ingly won­der­ing wheth­er the char­ac­ters had been based on mem­bers of their whānau.

Ka mau te wehi!