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 […]