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[7bitemytongue]

dreaming n listening to john maus .·:¨*:·. ͙⁺˚*･༓☾

[playsfordaaays-blog]

Wellington Theatre 2016

First post, 22nd January NZ time, hi!

Adam Goodall’s excellent article on the Pantograph Punch, "I Am More Important Than Shakespeare": Ten Moments in Wellington Theatre 2016 opens by analysing the general state of Wellington theatre in 2016. Given that I don’t know anything about the state of Wellington theatre in 2015 or 2014 or in any previous year, I can’t do anything similar here. In 2015, I started to be interested in theatre and went to a few plays, much fewer than this year, drawn by an interest in the theatre department at my then-new school Wellington High and by going to the plays put on by the Wellington Young Actors, a company which my friend Gabe Parkin is a member of. However, I didn’t really have anything approaching an understanding of what was even happening – I didn’t so much as know who The Bacchanals were until about December, and I managed to miss A Christmas Karel Capek. 2016 has been my first year in theatre, as it were, it’s been my first year where I’ve been attending plays regularly and keeping up with developments and criticism. As such, all I can say with my lack of context is that the year in theatre has been good, and that a lot of people have made good plays during it. This list is about those plays.

First item: my top ten plays of the year, in the order I want to give them attention

Hudson and Halls Live!

Everyone loved this play. It got fantastic reviews, apparently did very well at the box office (though I’m unaware of any available figures, I’m just going off how many people I heard talking about it and the large audience I saw it with) and swept the Wellington Theatre Awards. I’m slightly resentful of that last one – it wasn’t even from Wellington! – but I can see where the judges are coming from. Hudson and Halls was a very funny and completely engaging play. The most interesting part of the play for me was the core conceit that this was a live filming of an episode and that we were the studio audience, which allowed for the audience to be very naturally involved in the action because we were present in the diegesis.

The Trojan Women

I put this here primarily for the text. Greek tragedies aren’t put on terribly often, and this one was very rewarding to see. The new translation by Simon Perris was very good, and because of it you can now cite “f*** you and die” as a quotation from Euripides. The production itself was strong, with good performances that handled the meter well. Particular note should be given to Katie Alexander, playing Kassandra with captivating intensity, and to the Mad Max (mostly Fury Road)-based design. (I’d credit the designers, but the program contained the credits in a separate piece of paper and I’ve lost that piece of paper! I’m getting names from Theatreview, and I can get from there that Ashleigh Dixon and Rudimiller Mafi are the costume designers, but there may have been other people doing other aspects of the design and I’ll credit them if I find the credits.) I think that the entrance of Athena, borne aloft by a team of ten Greek men dressed like Fury Road’s War Boys, was probably the coolest thing I’ll see in a theatre for a long time.

Smells Like Xmas          

I started writing this post just a couple of days before I published it, but I was considering starting much earlier (yay procrastination!) Several weeks ago, I was considering making a start, but I thought I should wait until that Saturday, the 17th, when I would see my last two shows of the year: The Better Best Album Party That Anyone Has Ever Been Two and Smells Like Xmas. I considered it unlikely that any candidate for this list would arrive so late, but I was wrong. Binge Culture’s Christmas show was a great success of experimentalism. Its series of skits were often abstract and sometimes difficult to follow, but they were always absolutely hilarious. I’m of the understanding that Binge Culture has quite a good reputation; judging by this, it’s well deserved.

Hamlet

Quite a lot of people heard about this production, most of them were misinformed as to its nature. It was at the Pop-Up Globe for a single day, which is what most people know about it. It was actually touring the North Island, with the Pop-Up being a brief but notable stop. I don’t have that much to say about it, other than that it was a very solid production and that the all-female casting worked very well.

Titus Andronicus

2016 was a very good year for Aotearoa Tituses. This play, once one of the least popular, had three productions this year: one in Auckland at the Pop-Up Globe, one in Hamilton, and this one, in Wellington. It was the only one of these productions I saw (of course), and it was very good. Put on by a brand-new company going by the name of the Lost Shakespeare Company, which states that it is dedicated to putting on more obscure Shakespeare plays, it was a solid minimalist production. One thing that was very notable about it was that it had no fake blood or gore effects; a startling choice for this splatterfest of a play, but one which worked very well, allowing it to play more like a straight tragedy and clearly presenting the themes and characters in the lessened presence of shock.

Riding in Cars With (Mostly Straight) Boys

Another Auckland import! Sam Brooks had two plays running in early December: Making Friends Collective’s production of Wine Lips, which I missed, and this, his own production of the semi-autobiographical play which seems to be his signature. Another one where I don’t have much to say about it, just that it’s a complex, well-written and well-acted piece of work, and that Brook’s Bruce Mason Award is well deserved.

Well

I really wish I had a script of this. Well was a piece of verbatim theatre by new feminist theatre company Women Aren’t Wolves, dealing with mental illness from the perspective of people who have it. As a document it was vital, providing a space for people with mental illness to define their conditions in their own terms. The descriptions stated that they wanted to explore “what it means to be well”, and this production met that goal admirably.

Rukahu

James Nokise is completely amazing. I don’t think that there’s anyone disputing this. This play was simultaneously one of the funniest things I’ve seen all year and a searing piece of cultural comment and criticism. Some of this was lost on me, as I don’t really know enough about the sort of theatre he’s parodying to understand how his character, Senior Pacific Artist Jon Bon Fasi, applies to how real-life Māori and Pasifika theatre is handled by CreativeNZ and the general theatrical establishment (if that is his target, I think it is), but what I could understand was incredibly insightful. Nokise could write a book, but that wouldn’t get the audiences he wants, and it wouldn’t be as funny. This is what political theatre is for, and I’m not sure it even is political theatre.

When We Dead Awaken

This show was massively underappreciated. I’ve heard very little talk about it – there are quite a few reviews of it floating around, sure, but only because it toured the North Island and was reviewed in the newspapers where it went. It certainly had flaws, with the acting sometimes lacking variance in intonation, but this production of Henrik Ibsen’s symbolistic final play was extraordinarily powerful. Stripped down to just under an hour (an Ibsen play!), it was particularly notable for its blocking, its design (though the colour pallet was composed exclusively of my favourite colours so I am biased), its music, and the vocal work of the actors. I saw the first performance in the Fringe Festival and the last one at BATS in October, and both times the ending made me gasp from the catharsis.

Galathea: Into the Bush                                                

Ania Upstill had a strong year, first directing Love’s Labours Lost for Summer Shakespeare (which was OK), then Hamlet, then this. This play was an update of John Lyly’s Elizabethan play Galathea (or Gallathea or Galatea) about two girls being disguised as boys and sent into the forest by their fathers to escape being sacrificed to Neptune and falling in love while in the captivity of Diana’s Hunt, all surrounded by the machinations of various gods. Typical Elizabethan story. Opening a week and a bit after Trump’s election, this play wasn’t just funny (and it was very, very funny), it was happy, it was celebratory, and it represented a great variety of and was primarily aimed at LGBT people. All this made it very appropriate for the time, in a different way to most things of which that can be said. Representation will be increasingly important under Trump, both to humanise the people he’ll dehumanise and to create a space for said people. The humour, the acting, the theatrical skill, and the politics of this play are all things I hope I see more of in the plays of 2017.

Second Item: Shows I missed but really wish I’d seen

Shot Bro: Confessions of a Depressed Bullet

The Vultures

Mana Wahine (I need to make a note of the Kia Mau Festival next year!)

No Post On Sunday

The Fence (directed by the older siblings of one of the WHS Shakespeare directors this year!)

Wine Lips

A Trial and/or It’s a Trial!

Rose Matafeo: Finally Dead

Perhaps, Perhaps… Quizás

Not In Our Neighbourhood (though there’ll probably be another chance to see it)

Third Item: Now For Something Completely Foreign

It wasn’t a New Zealand play at all, but I saw a cinema screening of the RSC Hamlet with Paapa Essiedu and it was completely incredible. Keep an eye on Essiedu, he’s probably got a strong career ahead of him based on his performance. Keep an eye on anyone involved in this, really. This is possibly the best play I’ve ever seen in my limited experience.

Fourth Item: Ten favourite plays with enthusiasm translator (like the Obama anger translator but for enthusiasm)

Hudson and Halls Live!

Really funny! Good theatrical technique!

The Trojan Women 

Yay tragedy!

Smells Like Xmas        

Experimental! Hilarious!

Hamlet

Yay Shakespeare!

Titus Andronicus

Yay Shakespeare!

Riding in Cars With (Mostly Straight) Boys

Yay well-written character-based drama but also with jokes!

Well

I know things I didn’t before!

Rukahu

Best editorial is a comedy show!

When We Dead Awaken

Really impressive presentation of interesting overlooked text!

Galathea: Into the Bush                                               

Spreaded non-holiday-related cheer! (I realise spreaded isn’t a word)

Fifth Item: Shows I’m Looking Forward To In 2017

The Undertow

January. Four history plays about Wellington, viewable two at a time or in one ten-hour session with intervals.

Stoge Chollonge 2006

February. Fringe Festival. Comedy show about Stage Challenge and 2000s period piece.

Possible Bacchanals show

Only exists if David Lawrence manages to get out of the Pop-Up Globe or much less likely, if they go on with less of his involvement. Lawrence has said that he does really want to do something with The Bacchanals for the election year

Nearly Inevitable PSA Show

Almost certainly coming to the Comedy Festival. With an election year AND President Trump for meat.

Anything Ania Upstill makes next year

Anything James Nokise makes next year

Good luck for next year! I don’t think there’ll be much good for the world, but theatre’s going well, however much that even matters!