At first, we don’t know quite where to go. There don’t seem to be any ushers. Then a guy suddenly appears and says, no, no, down here. He whisks us out of the weirdly gloomy foyer into a neon-lit backstage corridor, and we emerge through the nether-regions of the wings and onto the very stage itself of the Waterfront Theatre, home of Auckland Theatre Company.

Socially-distanced plastic chairs are dotted around a minimal staging scaffold, with sweet lighting, some cool mellow beats and the cast basically hanging with the audience as we all roll in. Great start. Already, it feels like an adept resetting of the source text: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. In this 14th Century Italian collection of tales, a bunch of youngsters hang out on the outskirts of Florence, holing up in an old house avoiding death by the plague, telling stories of love to distract themselves from the boredom of a widespread pandemic. Sound familiar? We are – as they say – all in this together.

So: hats off the ATC folks who picked The Decameron as a vehicle to hitch a ride back to the land of live theatre. Perfect choice. They corralled a group of very hot writers, actors, musicians and techs to recreate a small sample of the original hundred episodes in a way that makes perfect sense to a modern, urban audience.

Writers Freya Daly Sadgrove, Leki Jackson-Bourke, Nathan Joe, Ana Scotney and Cian Elyse White deliver ten short narratives, each with their own kind of punch; each a kind of parable.

With a tight-knit ensemble cast, most pieces are narrated by a lead, with the other actors playing out the beats. The stories flow in and out of each other, but mostly all come together at a single subject: love – but from a wide range of angles.

I’m not going to break down each tale because that’s lame. It doesn’t feel like chapters: it feels like life lived at its shambolic and courageous best. With a deliberate focus on young talent, the show has a kind of pro-level youth theatre vibe, which personally, I love. Sure, it wears its heart on its sleeve, but don’t we all? Or rather, shouldn’t we all? As one soliloquy puts it: “Living in Auckland in 2020 with only white friends? That’s a choice!”

For all its pathos, it’s vigorously energetic, refreshingly honest and entertaining as hell.  

We see deception, connivery, corruption and greed. I’ve never read The Decameron but anyone with the briefest familiarity with Chaucer will recognise the scallywaggery immediately: he’s believed to have read the source text shortly before his own Canterbury Tales, which follow the same frame story structure.

Sometimes it feels like Breugel is in the room too: people everywhere, getting up to no good and loving every fucking minute of it.

And of course, these vice-like qualities are all too familiar in the post-everything 2020s. Think you can write a love poem today without considering porn? “Just make sure you clean your browser history,” they say. “Pretty sure Shakespeare and Chaucer never wore condoms.”

Just roll with it because before you know it, you’re into the next one, and the next and the next.

Actors Carrie Green, Trae Te Wiki, Ravikanth Gurunathan, Jess Hong and Patrick Tafa gel like whanau. They make a glorious feast of the ingenious stage layout, putting the audience on the stage and in the round, then lacing the staging through the seating, putting the audience right in the heart of the action. They deal with the jokes, the pathos, and the technical challenges of a complex space under weirdo pandemic conditions with endless style and panache. They eyeball audience members constantly and it’s impossible not to feel like you’re part of the crew.

There are no bad seats in this house. At times the cast gather together in the confined centre, and at other times stretch a narrative literally through the middle of the seating, and into the farthest recesses of the entire room. We look into the otherwise empty auditorium as a heroic battle of epic morals played out in the back of the stalls.

The creative team under Jane Yonge’s direction create an abstract and energised world that focuses on human intimacy at precisely the time it’s most needed.

Live music by Kenji Iwamitsu-Holdaway of the band Yoko-Zuna sometimes reflects and sometimes guides the mood, is always interesting and never intrusive.

48 Nights on Hope Street is part of ATC’s Back on the Boards festival, marking the company’s return to live theatre. This particular offering explicitly focuses on young talent, and pulls it off with spectacular success, making theatre that is fun, relevant and thought-provoking. Let’s hope ATC can fast-track that kaupapa into the rest of their programme.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer