The swish new Te Auaha Theatre in Dixon Street, complete with wide staircase and Michael Tuffery carpet, is the venue for Australian Amelia Jane Hunter’s first night of Die Blaue Stunde/The Blue Hour.

Our performer impresses me as classy: she’s tall and elegant in a pale green lurex pant suit, sparkling jewellery and high heels. Her opening burst of dance couples class with sass – a promising combination.

She explains the show’s title: the blue hour is that mysterious one between the last of daylight and start of night. Then she tells us where she’s been performing, and we enjoy the contrast between venues “redolent with urine” and the kind of person she is, or seems to be. This contrast is to be a feature of her performance; we’re going to hear “autobiographical atrocities”.  

So much for the set-up. Hunter is attempting that most challenging of things – turning her life story into a stage performance. It’s a tricky line to walk: avoiding self-indulgent confessional content and not preaching to the audience.

Generally, Hunter manages this well. She establishes her Catholic beginnings, confesses to an overlay of Buddhism, and amusingly rails against a bunch of backpackers – Jurgen and Gunther and Dieter – who first put her off Germans.

Ah, but then she gets to Berlin. And, not attracted by the architecture or the history, she finds herself “strangely aroused”. It’s at this point, more than at any other, that real contact with her audience is possible. How many of us, released from our colonial cultural shackles, found ourselves similarly strangely aroused?   

Berlin is clearly the high point of Hunter’s OE, and the high point of her story. From then on, with the possible exception of a New York interlude, her story becomes less inspired, and her performance somewhat fragmented. There’s time in England – “I dislike myself in London” – and an account of a wedding in the north of that country from which she is expelled for the crime of merely being herself.

Her mention of anger takes the show in a different direction. What, after all, can a highly intelligent woman who hasn’t got herself married off with children by her forties, say for herself?

Well, a life of adventure – whether it be the dungeons of Berlin, or retaliating with justification to the ridiculous English, or enjoying peanut butter excursions in good company in New York – seem a very fine alternative to me.

No matter what the adventures, and how absorbing the telling, at 70 minutes, Die Blaue Stunde runs a tad too long. The audience is happy enough, though, and our largely silent reaction to this show need not be taken as anything but an intelligent response to an intelligent performance. 

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