I can’t get enough of ‘Little Andromeda’ Otautahi’s brand new theatre ’n’ fun venue.

I feel like I’m in a bar downtown smack in the middle of the action. And that is because I am. The purple sandwich board along ‘the strip’ signals to turn up the fairy-lit alleyway, another beckons to turn into what could be a lobby for a smart ad agency, then up the lift onto a glass floor of very ‘now’ craft beer houses, eateries.

I love the pop-up-ness. I love the energy and guts of this young social-preneur Michael Bell. I love that the bar serves drinks from The Craft Embassy (which doesn’t serve Baileys on ice if you’re looking), giving ‘Little Andromeda’ a co-operative feel. Go check out the ‘taps’ too.

Well, THIS play.

I got to take my youngest to Me and My Nana earlier this summer. Now I’m taking my oldest and my father to The Opening Night Before Christmas. The theatre foyer is crammed. It’s got that buzz of a Friday night at Auckland’s Classic Comedy Club. But we’re in Christchurch and it’s Tuesday night, a fist full of days before Christmas. The raining is falling uncharacteristically (for Canterbury) past the balcony overlooking Oxford Terrace and the Avon River beyond. Theatre is not dead, people.

We file in. The conversation is young behind me. It’s quite common for me to feel antiquated lately. “I have so many snap groups it’s just ridiculous. Vegan brownies is me, Sophie, Alex. Sultanas is me, Lucy, Briana.” Young people come to the theatre, people.

The set is simple. A couple of flats either side of stage acting as walls, laden with tinsel and posters about “Livin’ in Levin”. Later these are revolved to expose black and white graffiti-like dark commentary on Christmas e.g. Christmas trees with down mouths.

The space is intimate. 100 people fit into this wee black box reminding me of Auckland’s SiLO in the good old days (now it’s the The Basement), Wellington’s BATS or Circa Studio – stretched but with the same simplicity, lack of high-end technology and plenty of risk-taking, kaha and heart.

A favourite lighting moment is when Santa stands purposefully or accidentally under a green LED and gets insulted as being a slimy jerk. Apart from this and the ultraviolet later, the lighting is seemingly traditional, in keeping with the am-dram-esque-ness of this play, written by two Kiwis. It feels like The Castle. Later, I check the production page and see that the publicist likens it to Waiting for Guffman meets Love Actually. It takes me a little while to embrace it; to drop the cares, the significance of my small life and accept this parody before me.

I’m sitting next to my Dad. There’s an early joke about Cobb & Co and Dad turns to me and not so quietly says: “That’s where you used to go to have your birthday darling.” Traffic lights, pink panthers and those deep fried corn puffed up rings (Cobb Crunchies they’re now called) come back to me, amidst other Greerton Tauranga memories. The years of Steinlager classic, Yalumba cask wine and knowing my Mum’s best friend’s landline phone number off by heart, so I could find her.

So, this PLAY.

Straight away I’m thinking, who wrote this? It feels alive. It feels like it belongs to these actors on stage tonight. It feels part ad-lib. The actors feel like family: inter-connected. I think of tens of reasons for this and end with: playful direction which allows the actors to fail (one of the clown commandments FYI), farken great acting (strong character acting, delicious comic timing, brilliant physicalisation, facial expression and gesture), brave writing that flows and with text that can fly freely.

A great show for an NCEA-er to view and write about such drama techniques in their external exam. There’s some side-splitting one-liners. Tom Eason’s character is described as a “gorgeous greyhound”. Chris Parker suggests Eason’s character, Russ, should be “tough like a sponge”.

This play has plenty of cringe moments, as the storyline explores the “shadows of Levin”. My PC-ness realises, half-way through, that this play is discriminatory: white big city people being racist about white small town people. Is comedy ever not mean? Does comedy live on as a back-to-front, underground, psychologically accessible way to explore our righteousness? Laughter is the best medicine of course, says Dr Madan Kataria (responsible for the global sensation Laughter Yoga).

The actors are having such fun in this Christmas show. It blows out those final end-of-year stress-webs for the audience. The actors eat ham and chicken luncheon sausage by the fat sausage roll, complete with plastic wrapping. Their gags and out-gagging each other remind me of The Four Noels. There’s a sparring, almost a competition of who can make who laugh on stage. The corpsing is a wee bit in-house but I think we all love it. The old-skool in me wonders if we’d laugh more if the actors didn’t break character at all. But this could be the perfectionist in me. Perhaps the faces turning upstage to hide their erupting smiles adds humanity to the falling apart pre-Christmas season.

“The kiddies need to know about adultery,” gets a particular guffaw and some stalling tactics whilst he recovers composure, masked by some fiddling with the corkboard stage right by whom I later learn is a co-writer and actor Chris Parker (seen around Aotearoa in their Hudson & Halls comedy). Yes this play has been jointly written by Chris Parker and Tom Sainsbury [the Snapchat Dude – ed].

Do I have a favourite actor tonight? I think it’s Brynley Stent, or is it Chris Parker or Phoebe Hurst or Tom Eason’s cop character? The acting is honestly, cross-my-heart-point-to-god-and-hope-to-die, phenomenal.

Holly Chappell-Eason’s direction flows beautifully and seems to have ‘got out of the way’ to allow these actors to ‘do their thing’. Without seeming bitchy, it appears the opposite of The Wind in the Willows, another Christmas show playing downtown. But maybe Chappell-Eason can do this because it’s a small cast in a small theatre with a small budget about a small town. Maybe she can ‘love these actors by setting them free’ because they’re skilled, very experienced, natural comics. Maybe she can do this because the bulk of the work lies in the casting – and she’s nailed it.

I saw Hurst as Yitzhak in Hedwig and the Angry Inch earlier this year. Eason starred in the ‘Tiny Fest’ with a solo show heavily experimental and brave earlier this month [and he was Woody in The Pink Hammer at the Court – ed]. I recognise Parker from the festival circuits as Halls of Hudson and Halls. A quick google search shows Stent fresh from ATC’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. [And Sainsbury, Parker and Stent have been regulars on TV3’s Have You Been Paying Attention – ed]  

These actors are all mic-ed, which takes a bit of getting used to, due to the placement of the speaker (which appears to be coming from upstage) but remember I’m getting old and a little more ‘sensitive to sound’ than others. This is a young venue, with probably next to no budget (come on funders give OUR lottery/ gambling, rates/ parking fines and capitalist pingers to this edgy populated theatre).

These actors are positively steeped in complicite as they say at Lecoq. They’re listening to each other. They’re taking on bold physicality – e.g. Stent’s almost hunchback low status posture or Parker’s ‘travelling’ line accompanied by arms out eagle wide like something from melodrama. They’re pushing the limits of comedy with their long stares, uncomfortable silence, contorted expressions.

Obviously, the best thing is to believe me and go and see these masters and mistresses treading the boards.

I’ve forgotten to tell you about the famous guest actor who is made to improvise live. What a brave and generous act for someone with profile to give a packed pre-Christmas audience. Dad and I have another geriatric moment and fess up to not recognising this Shortland Street actor: Kim Garrett [last seen at The Court in The Father – ed]. During half time, we wonder how many people watch TV anymore. My moving picture screen time revolves around Netflix, Vimeo, Facebook memes and short documentaries. Dad says RNZ is his go-to. We muse about the success of podcasts and radio which allow us all to continue with our busy lives of eating lunch, cleaning the bathroom, driving to swimming lessons, doing the invoices.

Garrett comes out with some of her own poignant one-liners – on the spot, may we remind you. During an improvised rap she’s the third actor to complete the sentence about what we should be doing during Christmas, her’s being: “We should all be vegans.”

It’s the end. We’ve all laughed our Santa socks off. My young snap-chatters behind me say: “That was the best piece of theatre I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“I’m coming again tomorrow, that was fantastic.”
As Dad says, “The crowd really got behind it, eh!”

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