Review: Ze: queer as fuck!

A mono­logue of self dis­cov­ery from a gen­derqueer, kinky, femme­sex­u­al, poly­mind­ed, gay-divorcee. From the open­ing sequence through to the end, this well con­struct­ed show ful­fills the pro­gramme promise that “by the end of this show you will know more about me than most peo­ple care to learn and hope­ful­ly some­thing about your­self.” Through sev­en piv­otal […]

Review: Manifesto 2083

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 peo­ple and injured more than 200 in Nor­way. Before he attacked his fel­low cit­i­zens he sent out a 1500 page man­i­festo con­tain­ing racist pro­pa­gan­da, philo­soph­i­cal reflec­tions, bomb man­u­als, inter­views he con­duct­ed with him­self and diary entries. Dan­ish the­atre mak­ers Chris­t­ian Lol­like, Olaf Høj­gaard and Tan­ja Diers […]

Review: Out of Darkness

Every year mil­lions of women and chil­dren around the world are traf­ficked and trapped in sex­u­al exploita­tion. Using sto­ries of real sur­vivors, Out of Dark­ness pre­sent­ed by the Just Be Col­lec­tive, fol­lows the emo­tion­al jour­ney of Alice as she is traf­ficked into sex­u­al exploita­tion and then res­cued and restored to find her way back to […]

Review: The basement tapes

After her Grand­ma’s death a woman is tasked with clean­ing out the base­ment of her house. As she sifts through what seems like every sin­gle thing her Grand­ma ever owned she dis­cov­ers a tape recorder. Then she finds a box of tapes — some of which work, and some which don’t. As she lis­tens to the […]

Acting Local

Not that long ago, we thought we’d have to keep a care­ful eye out for the slow, creep­ing rise of fas­cism in Amer­i­ca; now it’s com­ing on as a rapid, ter­ri­fy­ing avalanche. The mas­sive, spon­ta­neous air­port protests against Trump’s lat­est vile Exec­u­tive Order give some hope for the rise of resis­tance in the US itself, but some­times […]

Review: Jekyll and Hyde

Famous French* com­pa­ny A Slight­ly Iso­lat­ed Dog (so French, so famous) is back with Jekyll & Hyde. It’s about a very good man – Dr Jekyll — who indulges his very bad side – Mr Hyde — by drink­ing a potion. Only it’s not long before he doesn’t need to drink the potion for his dark […]

Review: The Undertow

The Under­tow is a mas­sive the­atri­cal epic pre­sent­ed by 35 per­form­ers from Te Rākau The­atre. Writ­ten by Helen Pearse-Otene and direct­ed by Jim Mori­ar­ty it fol­lows the sto­ry of sev­en gen­er­a­tions of Welling­to­ni­ans — Māori and Pāke­hā — as they carve out a life in Ōwhiro. Each of the four plays explores the expe­ri­ence of […]

Where the Wild Wind Blows

Where the Wild Wind Blows

We’re expect­ing some severe winds overnight and in the morn­ing, and sen­si­ble peo­ple are bat­ten­ing down their metaphor­i­cal (and occa­sion­al­ly lit­er­al) hatch­es. I saw a com­ment on a friend’s Face­book page from some­one over­seas say­ing “but sure­ly Welling­ton hous­es are built for the wind?”, and the answer is yes, but gusts of 160km/h are extreme enough […]

What Summer?

You’ve heard the com­plaints. You may even have uttered them your­self. “What hap­pened to sum­mer?” “Call this a sum­mer!?” “Bloody Welling­ton sum­mer.” And the half of offi­cial sum­mer that Welling­ton’s had so far is def­i­nite­ly sig­nif­i­cant­ly less warm than usu­al. But is it real­ly that unusu­al, and are we per­haps expect­ing too much from a Welling­ton […]

Cruisy

Evi­dent­ly, spend­ing four­teen nights on board a lux­u­ri­ous float­ing hotel can be a lit­tle dis­ori­en­tat­ing so every night at mid­night a crew mem­ber goes around all the ele­va­tors on the ship and swaps out a lit­tle plaque on the floor with the cor­rect day of the week. This is one of sev­er­al fair­ly astound­ing facts this […]