Review: The road that wasn’t there

Oliver de Rohan’s mother’s neighbours think she is going mad. Oliver is pretty sure she’s always been mad. She’s always been fanciful anyway, telling him stories of fairies and taniwha.  Did she really meet his father in a paper world? How did she get there? How did she get back? What is really going on? […]

Review: Perfectly wasted

Long Cloud Youth Theatre Summer School have worked with A Slightly Isolated Dog to investigate then recreate a night out. The show is frenetic with lots of short scenes from a typical night out. There’s a lot of drinking, some dancing. There are some ongoing stories but most of the action and interest is in […]

Review: Richard Meros Salutes the Southern Man

“Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” muttered Laurence Fishburne in 1999, proffering a pill-toting hand to lead us through the impending eschaton. Another decade, another looming ontological singularity, and whose palm are we to grasp? A glance down Courtenay Place offers the obvious answer: beckoning on the threshold, a towering Gandalf with more storeys […]

Review: The mousetrap

Agatha Christie’s The mousetrap is now in its sixtieth year of continuous production. It opened in 1952 (1952!) and is quite possibly more famous for being famous now, rather than the quality of the work. As part of the celebrations of the show’s longevity, 60 professional productions have been licensed around the world. The Australian […]

Review: The Tigers of Wrath

“Our parents do not follow a traditional perspective, growing smaller on approach. Only later will their true scale be apparent.” – Alan Moore, The Birth Caul Once, so the legend goes, there were a race of beautiful fiery-eyed children who heard the clarion-call of a new and brighter age; and buoyed by the prosperity wrest […]

Review: Paper Sky

Henry is a reclusive writer with a deadline (and a sad secret). He’s being hounded by his boss, his new neighbour is distracting, and to top it all off, his character, Lumina,  is fighting for her life.  Will his imagination help him come to terms with his problems in the real world? Red Leap Theatre‘s […]

Review: The truth game

Frank Stone (Alan Lovell) is acting editor of a daily newspaper. He’s been away and is back in the office and on the job again much sooner than his colleagues expected. There’s Ralph Jones (Brian Sergent),  long-serving journalist, Sam Hunter (Jessica Robinson), well-regarded journalist, Jo Pointer (Acushla-Tara Sutton), newbie journalist (who has come from blogging  […]

We’ll be WOWed for another nine years

This morning it was announced that the World of Wearable Arts has signed a contract with Wellington for the next nine years. That’s great news. WOW might not be your cup of tea, but it’s a big boost to our hospitality and retail sectors (worth more than $15.1 million, apparently). Sure, friends who work in […]

Review: Privatising Parts

It’s hard to come away from Privatising Parts without a renewed sense of optimism for our next step, you know, as humans. Teetering at the brink of a new dystopian singularity for every day of the week – global economic collapse, post-human obsolescence, a flailing mass descent through Sartre’s nausea and out into hyper-Materialist nihilism […]

Let us tell your kids where to go these holidays

The ‘ista may occasionally come across as a bunch of child-hating yuppies, but the truth is about 50% of us have kids, and we need to keep them entertained these holidays. So we’re gonna take them to Capital E. Why? Because we want to play the old school arcade games ourselves. From building mechanical marvels […]