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 […]