Stand up love 

Fred­dy is a come­di­an and has a drink­ing prob­lem. Ana wants him to stop. Their rela­tion­ship has prob­lems but they love each oth­er. Isn’t that enough?

I find the messy set – a bed with a couch backed on to the bed­head plus liv­ing items strewn around – appeal­ing, reflect­ing as it does the messy lives of the char­ac­ters. Jon­ny Potts makes a pass­able drunk (pas­sout-able?) and is pret­ty good at show­ing the com­pul­sion for push­ing oth­er peo­ple away which is a fea­ture of his char­ac­ter. Rachel Bak­er is self con­tained in her por­tray­al of Ana. This works espe­cial­ly well in the final scenes.  How­ev­er she seems to swal­low her words some­times so even though I’m sit­ting close to the front I miss sev­er­al of her lines. I like the direc­tion by Adam Goodall – the space is used well, and the moments when the char­ac­ter con­nect are more poignant for the moments when they don’t. Unfor­tu­nate­ly I’ve rather lost my appetite for love-should-be-enough-scripts so while the writ­ing is smart and the per­for­mances good, I’m most­ly dis­con­nect­ed from the whole thing. (For the oppo­site view please see this review from Welling­ton Reviews. I love that two so total­ly dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences can be had from the same show.)

Wine Lips

Brit vis­its her ex-boyfriend Scot­ty back­stage while he’s work­ing a show. She brings the wine, he brings the unpleas­ant mem­o­ries.

Tom Clarke and Karin McCrack­en have a love­ly rap­port and it’s easy to believe their char­ac­ters were once togeth­er. Clarke as Scot­ty rush­es about the stage, always smil­ing, putting a pos­i­tive spin on things – at least at the start. McCrack­en as Brit is more hes­i­tant, almost vis­i­bly steel­ing her­self to be more con­fi­dent in the face of Scotty’s ener­gy. The script has them needling at each oth­er in good fun and then tip­ping over into not so much fun. I start to wor­ry halfway through if this is too the­atre spe­cif­ic but as the show goes on I realise it could apply to any rela­tion­ship between two peo­ple which has bro­ken apart.  While they are work­ing out how to relate to one anoth­er again, anoth­er char­ac­ter is work­ing it on stage. Jacob Brown is Max, the per­former ‘onstage’. Max rep­re­sents Scot­ty and Brit in their ear­ly years of work­ing in the­atre – enthu­si­as­tic, will­ing to work long hours and per­form in lit­tle known shows. Snip­pets of the onstage show blare out from the back­stage speak­er, usu­al­ly herald­ing Brown’s fre­net­ic dash back­stage (onstage). Brown is won­der­ful­ly wide eyed in con­trast to the oth­er char­ac­ters cyn­i­cism and pro­vides some light relief while we wait to dis­cov­er what went wrong in Brit and Scotty’s rela­tion­ship. Stel­la Reid’s direc­tion is excel­lent, ensur­ing that while the stage is busy we nev­er lose track of what is going on.

 

Ngā mihi to Mak­ing Friends Col­lec­tive for includ­ing con­tact details for a cou­ple of sup­port organ­i­sa­tions in the pro­gramme for this well pre­sent­ed dou­ble bill. They write “These plays depict char­ac­ters that expe­ri­ence the emo­tion­al stress­es, neg­li­gence and many oth­er con­se­quences of bad rela­tion­ships. As a result, these plays include poten­tial­ly dis­turb­ing con­tent.” It’s a pos­i­tive move for audi­ence con­fi­dence that com­pa­nies pre­sent­ing work of this nature recog­nise that it may be dis­tress­ing for some.