Face of a pale fabric doll with long brown hair‘Peg­gy Pick­it Sees the Face of God’ by Roland Schim­melpfen­nig is open­ing at Cir­ca The­atre next week. A New Zealand pre­miere appro­pri­ate for our mod­ern lives, this play exam­ines colo­nial­ist atti­tudes over fresh­ly baked bread, and dis­cuss­es quar­an­tines and vac­ci­na­tions while shar­ing drinks — it’s irony, of a sort. Are we doing enough to help those who are less for­tu­nate? When is phil­an­thropy just for self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion? Is it up to us to care? 

The show explores two cou­ples meet­ing up after six years apart for one extra­or­di­nary but chal­leng­ing din­ner par­ty. Work­ing in med­ical clin­ics on oppo­site sides of the globe — Mar­tin and Car­ol in the devel­op­ing world, Liz and Frank in the west — the cou­ples find they have changed more than they realised dur­ing their time spent apart and their secrets begin to emerge. There’s adul­tery in med­i­cine, and loss too, and the char­ac­ters grate up against one-anoth­er, too dis­tant to com­plete­ly get along, but too sim­i­lar to dis­agree. This com­e­dy plays with themes of colo­nial­ism and rela­tion­ships, and how what we don’t say is just as impor­tant as what we do. Truth flows freely with wine, but so do secrets.

Direc­tor Giles Bur­ton speaks on what inter­est­ed him about the play, “I think it is the com­bi­na­tion of the sub­ject and the excit­ing way that the writer tells the sto­ry. By break­ing the evening down into short bursts, replay­ing and hav­ing the char­ac­ters com­ment­ing on their actions Schim­melpfen­nig allows us to see peo­ples’ thoughts and motives from dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, we may think we have a han­dle on some­thing but a moment lat­er we are shown it in a dif­fer­ent light.” 

Direct­ed by Giles Bur­ton (The Ugly One, The Man Who Was Thurs­day), set design from the amaz­ing Deb­bie Fish (Burn Her) and fea­tur­ing a fan­tas­tic cast of Patrick Davies (Scar­lett and Gold, A Ser­vant of Two Mas­ters), Rebec­ca Park­er, Fin­gal Pol­lock (Femme Natale) and Gavin Ruther­ford (Daf­fodils, Top of the Lake).