Twenty twenty-minute shows in one day… yes it is a marathon. Especially on those SEEyD space seats. Anyway, I’m not going to bother with an introduction proper, because the following couple of thousand words is probably enough! Let me say only that numb buttocks aside, the solo season at Toi Whakaari remains a fascinating event in the Wellington theatre calendar.

Group A

With Basted Helen Grant plays a grotesque clown, the surgically deformed media trout Daphne Day. The real-face mask that Grant has created is powerful. When it first peeks out from behind its magazine this face packs a punch, and Grant wears it well, holding her eyes wide open in a perpetual grimace. Her stupidity is compelling, a great clown attribute, but she loses her connection with the audience at times when she is handling props. It’s the mask that’s driving this routine, and it needs to be facing us continually. The structure of the piece is sound, but the drama could escalate far further into the realms of the absurd and extreme.

James Tito’s ambling, shambling prodigal son story is a puzzle. I understand his use of a stripped back form to tell a very intimate and personal tale, but not the unreliable narrator he presents: a forced, flat, weak comic, hiding from us behind sunglasses. As he rambles I find my attention beginning to wander. When Tito’s performance suddenly changes tone in an emotional reveal, it brings my attention back but can’t engage me; nor is this heightened emotion sustained long enough to bring to life the song which should be a poignant end to the piece.

Simon Leary’s The Election is a very simple and effective piece of drama. While the story of the battle for gay pride in an all boys’ high school is nothing new, our engagement is assured from the outset. Leary’s excellent writing shows a real eye for structure. His dramatic scenes are tight and efficient, moving the story forward through a series of beautiful tonal shifts. His characterisations are equally skilful and precise, involving us in each character’s world with a minimum of exposition and fuss. Leary also had a great command of the physical space; although simple, the staging was so seamless as to be invisible.

There is no denying that Meg Alexander’s character Karen is realistic, because I have certainly met a few Karens in my life. She’s a classic bogan, and like most bogans she’s very likeable. But a likeable character is not enough to sustain 20 minutes, and the story that is created around Karen feels episodic and superficial. Despite a major tragedy in Karen’s life, she doesn’t reveal enough emotional depth to keep us interested.

Group B

Jamie Smith’s question is posed in the programme: “can context make a trick more than just a trick?” The future world that Smith’s character Pelter inhabits is dystopian, industrial, but it’s really unclear who Pelter is, where he is, what he is afraid of, where he is trying to go. The intentions are unclear throughout the piece. When Pelter finds a feather on the ground it’s such an obvious foreshadowing of the huge, constructed wings that are lying on the ground and which he then ‘discovers’ that it may as well not be there. When he hungrily devours a tin of fruit salad, it’s simply boring. When he jumps onto a pole, climbs across the roof beams and out the window, or slides down the pole face first then jumps off to land on his feet, however, we are riveted and gasps emanate from the crowd. But they still remain the reason for the work, not the other way around. Perhaps if the context was better fleshed out then the tricks might become something more. 

Ivana Palezevic creates magic with Promena, a simple tale of love grown old, told entirely in Serbian. Palezevic’s challenge to herself, to communicate to her audience through physicality and vocal work without the crutch of a common language, pays off in strong measure. The simplicity of the storytelling is what allows it to become a thing of beauty, although there is a lot of repetition. What keeps the audience enthralled is Palezevic’s skill in holding stillness in the space, her complete physical control. She is equally well served by her excellent music choices and the elegant simplicity of her props, especially the wooden lantern which lights the start and finish of the piece. We could sit watching her grumpy old crone peeling the potatoes and scowling at us for hours, and when in a moment she transforms into a memory of her youthful self, radiant with beauty and naiveté, it is simply magical to behold.

Michael Leota’s attempt to wed the awesome, expressive power of Krump to theatrical storytelling yields promising, though not entirely satisfying, results. The dance form’s highly controlled use of breathing and explosive physical impulses marries well with Leota’s wish to convey the work and discipline of faith in practice. However, the piece feels cryptic, slightly hampered by the effort required to try and create meaning. The work feels least forced, and most theatrical when Leota allows the krump to speak for itself. 

My first response to Jennifer Martin’s Ivy is one of joy. This spirited outsider is here to take us on a journey into her very own special universe, in which she is the saviour of the dinsoaurs with whom she feels far greater kinship than with her fellow humans. Martin says in the programme that her aim is to create theatre “in the style that I want to see more of.” I can only encourage her, and assure her that there is an audience for her work. Ivylution is an epic fun time, and indeed there were loud snorts of laughter all around me throughout. In truth though, with too much repetition and no real raising of the stakes, I found my own enthusiasm for Ivy waning. I would have liked to see Ivy’s imagination challenged more, to see her thrown a curve ball and come out striking. Still, joy!

Group C

Chelsea Bognuda showcases vocal prowess with She Said, I Made, Done It, a slightly bewildering tale of small town loneliness. Bognuda juggles four characters dextrously: her 11-year-old self, and her three companions the arch, British Judgement, the harsh, American Menace and the weirdly Gollum-like Naiveté. Vocally it’s astonishing, technically tight, but the sheer complexity of the storytelling is too busy for the time she has to tell it in. The text is dense and rapid and crucially it is never really given any space to land with the audience. We watch, intrigued, but aren’t given the chance to invest.

Richard Osborne’s, Dickie’s Meadow, starts with a bang. Totally at ease in front of his audience, he hooks us with a brassy rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone and then starts a slow build which expertly ratchets up tension until the desolate conclusion. It’s well crafted to avoid exposition, instead allowing the audience’s imagination to fill in the blanks, ensuring their personal involvement in the developing story of a Liverpool lad who’s bitten off more than he can chew.

Tola Newbery works up a layered, poetic investigation into ‘that Tuhoe business’ with Pohatu. Again, it’s a slow build, and a thoughtful one, as Newbery’s plasterer character, Heremi Paraki, goes about his work. It is testament to Newbery’s skilful use of the space and of soundscape to build subtle layers of context that we are able to invest our time just observing his seemingly ordinary activity, trusting that it holds meaning. This is not to suggest that this activity is uninteresting – Newbery keeps the movement and dimensionality of the work dynamic, leaving everything fluid until his final address distils all the elements into a powerful poetic expression. A truly unique story and storytelling approach.

Tess Jamieson’s portrait of Vicki Wilson, a young woman shopping for spirituality while promoting grim commercial product in a supermarket, is a well-judged comic performance posing plenty of interesting questions. The juxtaposition of the allure of the exotic and the repulsion of the banal is fertile ground for irony, and the adspeak of product sales and supermarket loudspeaker announcements is used judiciously throughout to delicious effect. The comedy is structured into three sequences of essentially the same lazzi, but each time the stakes are raised. Jamieson performs the rising tension with aplomb and makes Vicki credulous, judgemental, but totally sympathetic.

Group D

Catherine Waller’s The Creeps was made with an intention to engage its audience directly, and Waller puts herself on the line physically to create some pretty freaky characters, slaves in a sort of Satanic carnival. The audience the day I saw the piece was reticent about talking with these freaks, and I am not sure how much the work would change if the audience did, for example, provide some nourishment for the poor starving sex slave. If Waller was trying to make us feel implicated in these characters’ tragedies she fell short of the mark, and the piece itself without our direct involvement feels awkward and under-written.

Robert Hartley’s D.R.E.G.S portrays Eugene, a WINZ case manager with a deplorable attitude. He’s into picking holes in history channel war documentaries, arguments against procreation, racial profiling – you know the kind of guy. It’s a beautifully crafted character study, bearing more than a passing resemblance to The Office’s Gareth. Hartley has filled his performance with details and subtleties that are very enjoyable to watch. Less successful is his suspension of our disbelief – that such a person could ever be employed by a cringingly P.C government appendage like WINZ, and that his dismissal from said job has had any real effect on him. In this sense, the character doesn’t really develop, he just sits in opposition to the world around him. The tension inherent in this position could have been mined for more dramatic results.

Melissa Reeve brings cinematic quality to Camera Obscura: La Donna Bruno Meets the Light, performed entirely in Italian. It’s an investigation into how women shape themselves to find success, the adaptations they must make to their identities to survive. This world of cameras, lights and sexual currency – the world of classic Italian cinema – obviously holds Reeve in thrall and she dwells there quite naturally and with a languid, controlled grace.

Someone get Bianca Seinfano a part on Shortland Street. It would improve the show, and it would make her life. Her tale of addiction to KFC and Shorty is lots of fun, full of warmth and the genuine flavours of Newtown. Seinfano has some truly gold material in here, especially her mihi at KFC Anonymous – “Ko ‘wicked wings’ toku favourite meal…” I laughed, a lot. I didn’t really understand why her Zumba class, her KFC addiction community group and her gluten-free cooking course were all run by the same Latina chick, but never mind. 

Group E 

In the programme notes Moana Ete describes her tendency to shy away from what she wants to say, and her struggle to find the best way to say it.  I Love You, Toru, Wha! does feel confused. It portrays a young woman from a religious family, sexually rebellious, confused about her feelings. She breaks out a ukulele to help her tell her story through song. Yet nothing really comes clear, and the songs themselves drag out what’s already a frustratingly muddy drama. I found it difficult to believe the emotional shifts that the young woman was going through, and finally I wasn’t sure what was the outcome – what, if anything, had changed for her. 

Philip Ward investigates his grandfather’s quite fascinating life – well, we have to take his word for it because he is having trouble actually turning it into a Solo… The stage is set up to represent Ward’s living room, with the teapot, lamp and armchair requisite for a storyteller, and he proceeds, in his amiable, droll manner, to self-reflexively muddle through his ideas about how he might go about staging his grandpa’s story. It’s a strange gambit and doesn’t quite pay off. Grandfather’s life does sound interesting, but Ward’s literal reading of everything skirts the knife edge of deadliness. It manages to avoid that, but theatrically nothing really manages to take hold of us, leaving grandfather Ward’s own private property. 

Esmee Myers’ Curiosity Killed the Kid is a drama about broken trust and innocence lost, with heavy Catholic resonance. The young girl’s hilarious discovery of ‘waterproof socks’ in her mother’s purse neatly hooks us into the story and from there we watch as the secrets unveil themselves. Myers portrays her characters earnestly and they are convincing. It’s a poignant flashback into an awkward time.

Jonathan Kenyon’s solo starts with as excellent a piece of clowning as I’ve ever seen. It’s simply a great entrance. Where to go from there? This is not strictly a clown performance, this character is more of an alien, discovering the world around him for the first time. The space, his body, sound, how these things interact, provide the source for the material of the piece. However, I feel like clown principles could have guided this work to a more successful outcome. The rhythm of the piece is hampered by Kenyon’s tendency to drop the escalations he initiates – he returns to an earlier, less interesting action after moving beyond it. This wreaks havoc with the structure of the piece and undermines its comic and dramatic potential. That said, Kenyon’s presence is excellent, he holds himself on stage in a very grounded manner, he keeps excellent contact with his audience, and with these tools he can achieve something remarkable. 
_______________________________
For more production details, click on the title above. Go to Home page to see other Reviews, recent Comments and Forum postings (under Chat Back), and News. 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer