What more could you ask for?  Entertainment, education and exercise, all rolled into one. Familiar Strangers makes for damn fine entertainment, it is filled with messages but you’re not banged over the head with them, and it’s a good two hour trot around the streets of Central Wellington. Many of those you meet along the way you really don’t want to say goodbye to – prostitutes, good time girls, lost souls, beggars, the kind of people, let’s be honest here, most of us pass by without a second glance, or thought.

Along the way you’ll find Andrew, who clutches a map, he’s lost his way and his mind with the death of his wife and estrangement from his children.  Mere also has mental health and drug issues, but eventually she finds a sense of purpose.   Alice Cheshire perches in a tree while Wendy does tricks as she trys to work out the murderer on her block.  

Familiar Strangers is as much about community as it is about some of those living on the fringes of urban society, so the audience is carved up into small communities to walk around together, follow the map and clues (neither are tricky) and encounter the actors en route.

It’s just as entertaining to watch the passersby watching the actors.

James Hadley and Rachel Lenart have hand-picked an exceptional cast, most new faces but you’d never know it from their assured performances.  To pluck out a few from the nine would be wrong, this is pure ensemble theatre, so congrats to them all: Belinda Bretton, Barry Lakeman, Jean Sergeant, Rapai Te Hau, Jack Shadbolt, Karen Anslow, Jared Edwards, Nina Baeyertz, Brook Smith-Harris. 

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Connect Productions’ Familiar Strangers leads its audience on a journey around Courtenay Place and its fringe. During our map guided walk we encounter diverse performers who inhabit these spaces. They are outsiders, fringe dwellers; the kind of people that you would normally avoid or ignore. But the message is that these people are valuable members of our communities, who can offer unique insights into living and loving in Wellington.

The performance begins at Paramount with a run-through of logistics. The audience is divided into four groups by being given a suit of cards and an arm band. We are issued with maps and instructions and advised to stay together and use pedestrian crossings. The groups then proceed to follow their designated route, visiting each performer in a different order. Promenade theatre on one of the city’s busiest streets would seem to involve a mass of logistics. However, the map and instructions prove easy to decipher, and we can usually pick out the performers well in advance – although it probably helps that our armbands make it easy for them to spot us.

The first person my group encountered was “Andrew”, a lonely old man, lost in an alleyway, determined to walk the streets of Wellington, map in hand, in order to make new friends after the passing of his wife. Barry Lakeman performs his character with an excellent mix of nostalgia, bewilderment and excitement. Our group warmed to him, and several people remarked that they hoped he would come back.

Then we interrupt the performance of “Richard” (Jack Shadbolt), a homeless harmonica-playing busker on Courtenay Place. He leads us around the James Smith/Duxton car park building, showing us his cathedral, the art work and his sleeping area before depositing us outside the City Mission. I wasn’t the only one who had no idea the Mission was situated down that alleyway. We emerge back onto Manners Street and cross to Pigeon Park where Nina Baeyertz performs as “Kit” in a scene entitled “The Island of Silent Echoes”. She draws our attention to the full range of phenomena that can be perceived by our senses in the central city – the sounds, smells and energy that we neglect to perceive. She’s most interested in how sound waves reach our ears and she draws us together for a demonstration of this.

After this we encounter an entirely different young woman, the bolshy Melody (Karen Anslow) who teaches us lessons in modern feminism (ie how to turn every game of sexual politics back to a woman’s advantage). This was one of the better scripted pieces, and we were laughing as she strutted off into a bar, giving a good sense of her story continuing past our interaction with her.

Then we left the streets for Waitangi Park, where a feisty German backpacker, Franke (Brooke Smith-Harris) interrupts contemplative Russian, Alexi (Jared Edwards) from his Foucault. This was the only scene in which we sat down and watched the actors in a more conventional way, instead of following (sometimes chasing) them. After the two new friends (lovers?) scamper off we encounter Alice (Jean Sergent) in a tree opposite Bats. Like Kit she encourages us to take in more of our surroundings by looking up once in a while. This is the most surreal encounter we have, as Alice recites poetry, performs a ‘magic’ trick and tells us stories until she gets confused and anxiously tells us we’d better go.

Next is Mere, played by Rapai Te Hau. She is singing “Nobody’s Child” when we come upon her, and this is apt as she is an abandoned child and dispossessed schizophrenic adult, who only finds some stability when she connects with her whanau and joins the h_koi. We leave her standing proud with the tino rangatira t_nga flag unfurled under the statue of Queen Victoria. Members of our group felt that this was the story that worked the least due to a lack of clarity and Mere often directing her speech to absent characters. However, Te Hau exudes a warmth that makes her no less likeable than the other familiar strangers we’ve encountered.

Finally we hear from the paranoid street worker, Wendy (Belinda Bretton) in a scene entitled “Neighbourhood Watch.” A girl has been murdered, and Wendy, who watches everyone and everything in her part of town, has a fair idea who the culprit is. Bretton is guarded in her performance, but goes to great effort to hold our eye contact past the point of comfort. She is also the most exposed of the performers, as her scene takes place on Courtenay Place, but she deals with onlookers well.

The scenes are devised by the performers and either director James Hadley or Rachel Lenart and are scripted by the actors. This has helped the actors really ‘own’ their characters, whilst the involvement of two directors means that overall coherency in the piece is not lost. Some more consideration could have gone into the final scene however – it seemed to just be an excuse for the actors to congregate and take a bow.

Familiar Strangers builds upon the successful Lovers of Central Park in last year’s Fringe Festival, breaking performance conventions in a similar way. Whereas Lovers had a more concentrated setting but many disconnected stories, I felt that Familiar Strangers had a far more interesting and coherent theme, provoking the audience to think about diversity and community. Highly recommended for those who want to see a show that is experimental, but still of high quality.

Originally published in The Lumière Reader.
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Courtenay Place, its environs and the people who inhabit them will never look quite the same after you have seen Familiar Strangers. Billed as ‘Outsider Insights on Life, Love and Wellington’ it is another Connect Productions site-specific ‘promenade theatre’ work, produced by James Hadley.

Last year’s Lovers of Central Park was written and produced by Hadley, who was joined by four other directors in the process of ‘staging’ the diverse segments that traversed more than a century of history as its characters were discovered in different parts of the park.

This year Hadley directs five and Rachel Lenart directs three of Familiar Strangers‘ eight scenarios. Each director is credited with co-devising each piece with the actor(s) involved while the actors get the scripting credits [click on the title above to find the full credits]. And this time all the character-driven scenarios are contemporary, or at least not set in the past.

We gather at the Paramount bar, able to fortify ourselves against the two-hour stroll – with mostly standing pauses – ahead. Here we sign in, get assigned to a playing-card-coded group and receive a briefing. The starting point for your circuit of viewing, or encountering, the scenarios differs according to the group you are in.*

In ‘Fighting Connects’, when international backpackers Franke (Brooke Smith-Harris) and Alexi meet in Waitangi Park, the rules of conversing with strangers cause initial friction, then sexual energies add a more anarchic spice to the proceedings. At least one voyeur in our group wanted to follow them rather than move on to our next brief encounter.

‘A Beau Je Beau Retour’ finds Alice (Jean Sergeant) up a tree on the Welsh Dragon Bar (aka, The Taj) traffic island. Her fanciful view of life, shared in rhyming couplets, includes tea-towel origami, an observational anecdote about birds and one of her 52 stories about the Market Place at the Top of the Sky. I feel strangely touched by a sadness that suddenly peeks from beneath her ebullience.

On the island further south (that divides Kent and Cambridge Terraces), Mere (Rapai te Hau) is crooning ‘Nobody’s Child’. This lost soul, abandoned by her mother, has had issues with drugs and sojourns in psychiatric wards. Now we stand in for her best friend George who is perhaps more attentive than she can handle at present. It’s when an uncle finds her and hooks her into a hikoi that she finds focus, proudly holding a Māori sovereignty flag in front of the statue of Queen Victoria. Hence the title: ‘Turangawaewae’.  

‘Neighbourhood Watch’ finds an unusual stalwart in Wendy (Belinda Bretton), first encountered emerging from a public toilet with a young man who scuttles away. As clues to the past that led her here also emerge, along with her future dreams of fame and fortune when (married) Michael from Auckland with his camera, her preoccupation with a recent murder and the well-endowed local bar-owner Jack becomes the immediate issue.

Up the alleyway beside the St James, a dishevelled old man called Andrew (Barry Lakeman) has lost his way. His story (‘Gone Fishing’) of love and loss, of being marginalised, emerges as he chats animatedly, eager to hang on to the company we offer.

In a laneway beside the Opera House, a harmonica-playing busker – Richard (Jack Shadbolt) – calls it a day and takes us to his lair in the James Smith car parking building. As his journey from the family farm to the big city filters through, he opens our eyes to architectural phenomena and the street-dwelling culture. A nice touch is that we are asked to drop his busker taking into the bucket outside the Downtown Ministry.

Pidgeon Park is dubbed ‘The Island of Silent Echoes’ in the experience we share with Kit (Nina Baeyertz). The science of sound is her main fascination, along with light waves and smell, as she muses on questions most of us are too busy to consider. She leads us into the prow of the ceramic waka … But the rest cannot be silence in a city.

Melody (Karen Anslow) is not a happy girl when we find her abandoned by her so-called boyfriend in a Blair Street doorway. But there’ll be others. She has a swag of strategies for surviving in the mean metropolis, for which the rise of the Exchange Atrium from the demolition site it once was (a photo tells the tale) is a clear metaphor.

The over-riding metaphor, reinforced as we finally gather beneath the Weta Sculpture at the Calzone end of Courtenay Place, is the pack of cards: a gathered diversity that, well handled, can offer access to countless pleasures.

And as these rehearsed scenarios have been played out, the real world has walked and driven on by, or watched or ignored the weirdos we must seem to be … Familiar Strangers is over now, but the theatre of real life continues. Now we see that the familiar may be even stranger than we thought it was, and yet we are now more familiar – and at home? – with what seemed strange.
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*For the record, here’s how it works: the Diamonds group starts with the backpackers at Waitangi Park, the Hearts group starts with Nina’s performance at Pigeon Park, the Clubs group starts with Barry’s performance behind the St James, and the Spades group starts with Rapai’s performance by the Queen Victoria monument. All four groups move around the circuit in the same direction with a gap of one other performance in between each group so that hopefully they don’t catch up with the group ahead. Ingenious.

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