Not for the first time has a show at Bats Theatre been a series of short pieces to make up the whole. Together All Alone, New Zealand playwright Angie Farrow has written six 10-minute long sketches that are succinct and complete and each in its own way engaging. 

Not an easy task to create characters and a story within such a short time frame, and while some of the pieces are more radio than stage plays, all six do tell some sort of a story. [More] 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

Playwright Angie Farrow says of the short form that she enjoys “pressing something huge into a small container.” I can’t help thinking of the Japanese ritual tea bowl or the haiku – embodiments of the Zen principle that we approximate these days in the phrase less is more. The spareness of form paradoxically amplifies the power, but only if executed skilfully.

Farrow’s six new plays, collectively entitled Together All Alone, certainly demonstrate her mastery of the short form, and directing team Jaime Dorner and Rachel Lenart present them as a cohesively dysfunctional family of questions about reality.  

‘The Real Thing’ is a miniature crime drama parody that blurs the lines of theatrical illusion and subjective reality as a bystander of sorts (Hannah Pratt) becomes a suspect.  ‘Leo Rising’ is an extraordinary solo journey by Hannah Pratt through the jilted bride’s collapsing illusions.

When Jess Hong and Hannah Pratt find ‘The Body’ we see into the dubious realities of their virtual lives. In ‘The Perfect Life’, Sam Daly confronts the gap between the dream and the reality of a life’s journey.

In ‘Happiness’, strangers (Robert Lloyd and Hannah Pratt) meeting in a park remember their life together. ‘Goodbye April’ suggests a surreal children’s game of happy families, underscored by a very unsettling melody reminiscent of nursery chimes (sound designed by Brad Jenkins). 

Production design (Natala Gwiazdzinski) is fittingly spare but high-impact, with some neat innovations in the multi-purpose venetian blinds. Cueing is necessarily sharp and executed deftly by a strong cast. The transitions between each strange, self-contained narrative gesture to the thematic continuity of the collection. It is as if each play is one facet of something much too large to view in its entirety but in relationship with one another the small stories give rich form to the larger one. 

Uncanny, light-hearted, brutal, witty … Each of these bonsai plays touches on a poignant desolation at the heart of the illusions from which we weave our lives, but raises a sense of liberation from the fatalism of attachment to those illusions. I’m back to the Zen references again. Forgive me. Go and see this!

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer