I felt slightly reluctant to watch a further 3 hours of graduate-student solo works from the deeply uncomfortable seats at the SEEyD space at Toi Whakaari last weekend.  Although this environment is infinitely more suited to the works than the D3 studio upstairs that housed last year’s season, it is a grueling place to sit for more than a couple of hours. 

Nonetheless, the experience is overall very rewarding.  Groups A & B further reinforce the Go Solo programme as richly fertile and well cultivated ground for an increasingly confident crop of artists to grow their skills, not just as actors but also as theatre-makers.

Sara Allen’s Pure Whites and Blood Lines is a slow start to Group A, an over-familiar tale of Irish ancestry told across generations and through the washing hanging on the line.  The structure and emotional narrative are laborious, and the stoned mother character is at first a bit too fast and fidgety to really ring true, but Allen does master the Irish accent convincingly, and I warmed to her performance.

Adam Tatana’s piece is also slow moving, yet remains riveting throughout.  Displaying great focus and silent intensity in his performance, Tatana explores the topical theme of New Zealand’s Vietnam veterans in The Walk Out.  The above mentioned chairs creak and groan as the audience squirms through Tatana’s excruciating silences, but there’s no taking your eyes off him.  He in turn pierces his audience with a glistening stare – a maelstrom of violence and hurt that contrasts superbly with his onstage restraint and precision.

The tone lightens considerably with Paul Harrop’s He Calls a Spade a Spade.  This portrait of a Rick Moranis-like nerd and his dead mother is crisp and funny, drawing on 1950s Americana motifs but arranging them in a new context.  Themes of nature versus nurture speak to the current fascination with the autistic spectrum – ‘Billy’ could be proto-Aspergers, dwelling in an era before such labels or identities were available.

Finally, Kirsty Peters’ Kev’s Time to Cut the Cake is a Lindauer-drenched glimpse into disheveled bride Cleo’s boudoir.  Peters plays an uproariously convincing stage-drunk, wrangling props with an expert clumsiness and disintegrating into slurry, incomprehensible rambles that only she can understand.  She plays it for laughs, and though the finale stretches the suspension of disbelief a touch too far it’s still a fun ride.

Group B’s opening piece, by James Winter, is strangely detached.  While Winter’s text is funny, dramatic and lyrical, his delivery doesn’t do it justice.  Vagaries of modulation and intention keep Winter aloof from his audience despite his directly addressing us.  It’s interesting, given the piece’s theme of isolation, but not dramatically engaging.  Sean Penn’s biopic Into the Wild took the same theme to the opposite extreme of sentimentality, but Over/Out suffers for its cold heart.

Sera Henare ‘brings it’ to the stage with a tale of two b-girls, hip-hop dancing aspirants from markedly different homes auditioning for their big break.  Little Miss evokes well the fears and pressures of adolescence, and of following your passion in a competitive world.  The multiple-character technique is more successfully performed elsewhere in the programme, but Henare has some nice touches in her characterisations and her dancing is powerful and confident, bringing energy to the piece.

Hadleigh Walker’s Homebass spoke directly to me, as a first-time dad in a primary caregiving role.  Walker’s performance is full of minutely observed nuance, and his subject matter is rich and contemporaneous – a one-time rock musician now pushing the pram, and struggling with his identity.  The piece throws up questions about how little progress our society has made in rewarding the work of the housewife, or indeed househusband.  It’s quality material throughout, but some judicious cuts may have helped the overall structure of the piece.

Last, but certainly not least, Krystal Neho’s Lapse of Time is unmatched in the entire programme for sheer emotional impact.  What starts off as a light, funny story of two siblings’ trip to the shoe shop with their grandparents gradually builds in texture and depth until it ends with a powerful, resonant note that leaves few dry eyes in the house.  Neho’s command of multiple characters and their emotional truths is impressive, recalling Madeline Sami’s performance in No.2.  This is a personal story, and Neho invests her warmth, love and humanity to create a truly moving theatrical experience.

The Go Solo season is a great opportunity for Wellington audiences to see the degree of craft that is required to make good theatre.  Of all the performances given by the students of our premiere drama school, the solos remain the most vulnerable, raw, diverse and ultimately the most relevant.  This year’s batch is, I suggest, an improvement on last year’s – in part perhaps due to the new space, and as the aims and intentions of the module become more clearly articulated and understood.

It’s also a pleasure to see that this year’s group have really played to their strengths; some are clearly strong writers while others use visual impact, some use classical acting and others explore physicality and stylization, some work their skills as dancers, singers or musicians into their pieces.  Go Solo has proven itself a worthy competitor to the Film Festival for audiences seeking intriguing, bold and new visions.

For Thomas’s review of Groups C, D & E, click here.

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Reviewing the Toi Whakaari graduate-class Go Solo 08 season is a marathon effort, consisting as it does of twenty separate twenty-minute solos.  Although these are grouped into sets of four, to see the full programme means watching around seven hours of performance.  Last weekend I sat through four and a half of those seven hours (groups C, D, and E), and am now faced with the challenge of distilling the experience, without diluting the flavours that this smorgasbord contains.

Group C begins with Dawn Cheong’s OLIN, an impressively choreographed, Buto influenced visitation from an insectoid god.  Cheong’s emergence from the chrysalis is a powerful opener and her mesmerising movements are well supported by dramatic lighting states and elemental sound effects.  Sam Bunkall’s Hideorama follows, merging the story of the Elephant Man with themes of modern day plastic surgery in a bold and surprising way.   This piece also starts with an arresting image and Bunkall demonstrates a controlled use of mime techniques to serve the unconventional narrative.

Martine Gray is the odd one out in this group, her Playing House a minutely observed, multi-character naturalist piece set in a Berhampore flat.  Gray’s stark set is fleshed out with smooth scene transitions and an excellent use of space, building the drama to a simple but powerful ending.  Closing the bill is Maria Walker, with Iro’s Stall, an extraordinary character study performed without text.  Walker creates a wonderful monster, a deeply deranged obsessive/ compulsive clown, using her beguiling face to its full expressive potential.

Group D introduces Esther Green, whose themes of eccentricity carry through into a truly individual performance.  Green’s text is great, and her delivery confident, and while the staging sometimes feels clumsy, Shoes for Flying and Finding is the work of a very strong creative voice.  James Kupa follows with Invisible Piper, a time-travel mind-bender that references any number of films and, awkwardly, Stephen Townshend’s solo performance of last year.  Some nice ideas are investigated, but the physical sequences and characterisations are both under-developed.

Tansy Hayden’s Hay Daze is a tautly written and fresh take on parochial themes.  Hayden seemed nervous at the session I saw, but warmed into it, and her initial physical stiffness turns out to have a very good practical reason.  Essentially a monologue, Hay Daze has some great one-liners and is a genuinely moving tale.  Barnaby Fredric steals the show, though, in The Irrefutable Truth About Pet Food, an irreverent spoof soap opera with shades of Andy Kaufman and Mike Myers (in his heyday).  Full of great characters and inventive sight gags, and with a moral ending that had the audience in fits, Fredric’s piece harnesses the true power of comedy.

Group E is already underway as the audience enters, with Chelsie Preston Crayford’s creation Valerie in full swing, greeting and chatting with them as they seat themselves.  Something Blue is a tragicomic character study, and what comes through is Crayford’s delight in the role.  Although at times Crayford’s youthful energy breaks the illusion of Valerie’s age, and despite a slightly annoying affectation in her physicality, Crayford invests this fragile soul with a lot of love and with a phenomenal audience rapport.  Melanie Firbank’s Liberty is a heritage piece, based on a Scots ancestor deported to Australia for theft, and exhibiting the requisite calico peasant dress and a thick, unplaceable accent that seems halfway between Scots and Irish, with a pinch of Dutch.  Firbank performs a very impressive solo stage fight, dragging herself along by her own hair, and finishes the story with a nice flourish.

Asher Smith’s The Return of the Queen, by contrast, is a very contemporary story of a farmer disenfranchised by LOTR Tours that are gradually taking over his land.  The great characterisations here recall Wheeler’s Luck, but unlike that play there is no explicit championing of the rural poor over the rich developer.  Sam Eagle is flogging a dead horse (or something like it) by resisting the tourist trade, and the conflict resolves in an uneasy compromise by way of some delightfully inventive black humour.  Finally, Julia Croft makes good use of a face that is at once iconic and comical in Requiem, a poetic and highly theatrical performance that deals with some deep philosophical questions about responsibility and justice.  Croft uses archetype and modulates her voice with skill to bring a real quality of storytelling to the work.

For many of these young actors, this season is the first time they will present theatre that truly originates from them as an individual; for some it will also be the last.  It is a tribute to the calibre of Toi Whakaari as an institution that in this season, as in last year’s, we are able to see such diversity of thought and expression presented with such flair and confidence. 

For Thomas’s review of Groups A & B, click here.
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