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 […]

Review: Serial Killers

The Gryphon’s pro­duc­tion of Seri­al Killers is a peri­od piece set in the days when instead of say­ing “You­Tube” we said “net­work tele­vi­sion,” and instead of bemoan­ing “real­ity TV” and its effects on the unwashed-at-large, we bemoaned “soap oper­as” and their see above. One assumes it’s inten­ded as ever­green com­ment­ary upon the early 2000s when […]