A veritable cornucopia of positive observations come to mind in response to this inventive production, none of them more sincerely recorded than ‘welcome’. A solid cohort of eleven and twelve year olds, emerging from the disruptions of the Christchurch earthquake, entered the fantasy offered by Capital E with understandable relish.

This is not to downplay the credit due to the creative team and actors who establish an intimate computer game set within the large auditorium and lay the foundation for some perceptive discussion back in school about family values, respect and good old fashioned courage. 

For starters a divorced mother, Rosie, and her young teen son, Alex, fire out a log of their daily doings. Clearly they are not in anything like a companionable space. Mum is hooked on her Blackberry. Son is welded to his laptop. This part of the play begins to pall, in spite of hectic delivery and smart manipulation of designer Brian King’s clever set made up of handy cubes, but then comes a visit to Grandpa, recovering in hospital from a heart attack.

Rosie plugs her Blackberry into a stray socket to recharge it and the world is never the same again. At this point technology transforms the story into a fable with our duo revamped as Pluto and Madonna (their Gamer names).

They are inside a game and young Alex/Pluto summons all his skills to guide them through a series of challenges. In the course of adventures they must listen to each other; work together until they finally break through the shell of indifference and self absorption.

The triumph – production-wise – is the ingenuity and creativity of sound and computer bits, not to mention the enterprising use of older technologies such as the inflated fabric which becomes a perilous bog or spiky mountains.

Amy Tarleton puts the case for mothers with appealing spontaneity. Even so, the sympathies of the young audience seemed solidly behind Alex, played wholeheartedly by Dan Weekes. Supplying various voices for characters within the game, Kenny King cranks up the atmosphere at every invitation. 

All up, a polished and imaginative production coating the social message with genuine theatre magic. Thanks for coming Capital E. 
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What’s refreshing about this story for young people that’s full of Facebook and on-line gaming and pop culture references, is that the storytelling techniques are beautifully low-tech. A swamp is created by two people manipulating a large sheet and Nathan McKendry’s clever lighting. A box and a sheet become a frightening ice monster and lots of boxes create everything from a car and hospital bed, to a memory-crunching monster.

Rachel Callinan and Kate Morris tell the story of a mother and son struggling with the generation gap. Both are addicts of technology, yet they can’t communicate with each other. The mother (Amy Tarleton) is wedded to Facebook and her Blackberry and is desperately searching for love on line, while her son (Dan Weekes) loses himself in a game called Fablestory and resents being told what to do. When a member of the family falls sick, they find themselves within Fablestory and have to work together to escape. Through co-operation they get to know and appreciate each other better.

Tarleton is terrific as the modern day mother, stressed and lonely and misses the closeness she used to share with her son. Weekes has that teenage gangliness and attitude, but tends to both rush his lines and mumble – tweenie Rose could hear every word but the older generation really struggled at times.

Brian King’s set is deceptively simple – heaps of boxes – but they are ingenious. Leo Gene Peters has a fondness for boxes, having used them before in plays, and he has his cast use them to full effect. Gareth Farr’s musical score captures that incessant gaming sound that drives parents crazy, helping build a sense of urgency as the quest progresses.
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Alice went down a rabbit hole to Wonderland because she couldn’t see the point of reading a book without pictures or conversations; just before she went through the looking-glass she played a game of chess. That was 19^th century fantasy.

21^st century fantasy, as seen by Kate Morris and Rachel Callinan in their amusing play for Capital E End Game, has Alex playing computer games. Just like Alice he’s sucked into another world, the world of his favourite game. In its 21^st century way it’s a world as scary and topsy-turvy as the worlds that contained Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Mad Hatter.

But unlike Alice he has a companion: his mum. She is finding that raising a cyber-obsessed teenage boy on her own is a bit of a handful as we discover in a slightly over-long introductory scene. She nags at him (“nagging is a parental right”) about the time spent on the computer, though she corresponds with a dubious Spanish boyfriend on Face Book and she can’t live without her Blackberry.

Once inside the game the pair (now named Madonna and Pluto) are faced with a quest (mum keeps calling it a test) during which they learn, after they have nearly drowned, scaled a mountain, and fed a mechanical monster with their most precious possessions, what they mean to each other. Thankfully, the message isn’t rammed home in words; just a simple gesture between mother and son.

Brian King’s setting of wooden boxes works a treat and is able to be converted in fractions of a second (with the aid of Nathan McKendry’s lighting and Kenny King and an unnamed assistant’s hidden maneuverings) into mountain tops, a monster, dangerous rocks, and the rooms of a house, school and a hospital. The computer game designs at the side and above the stage are also simple and effective.

Dan Weekes avoids making Alex geeky and he gets across the teenager’s mania as well as his irritation at his mum’s nagging without our losing sympathy for the character, though he could slow down a bit during the long opening sequence. Amy Tarleton as the mother finds that fine balance between comedy and emotional truth with her usual accuracy and panache. Another fine Capital E production aimed with pinpoint accuracy at its target audience.

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As directed by Leo Gene Peters, End Game by Kate Morris and Rachel Callinan (not to be confused with Samuel Beckett’s Endgame) stages a highly technological cyberspace concept with great ingenuity in real physical space, abetted by Nathan McKendry’s brilliant lighting of Brian King’s deceptively simple box and fabric set to Gareth Farr’s stirring music.

As the story plays out the set is also brought to extraordinary life through the hidden efforts of Kenny King – who also voices a range of game zone characters – and stage manager Rebekah Sherratt.

But first, the daily routine is depicted. Apart from sharing the same abode, the only thing compulsive schoolboy gamer Alex (Dan Weeks) and his solo mother Rosie (Amy Tarleton), who works in PR, have in common is they both turn their computers on a 6.45am.

His home away from home at home is Nintendo; hers is Facebook. Their paths cross on the rides to and from school although he is invariably deep into his laptop while she is on her hands-free phone.

What with her ex husband, Alex’s father, off working in Geneva, one other thing they have in common but take for granted is her father, his granddad, until his something sudden – we’re not told what but his unconscious presence is manifested by a heart monitor – brings them to either side of his hospital bed. And it’s not long before they both resort to their electronic equipment.

It’s when she tries to recharge her Blackberry from the same power source his laptop is plugged into that a power surge zaps them into a parallel universe, where his gnome avatar Pluto and her elf avatar Madonna (which she sticks to although he finds the name embarrassingly lame), are obliged to embark on a quest – not a test; a quest – to stop their elder’s life bar petering out altogether.

Billowing fabric over the ever-moving, rising and falling boxes manifests the fraught-with-dangers terrain they must traverse to overcome obstacles and meet challenges in their life-and-death quest. In the process her innate desire to protect him by taking control clashes with his frustration that she never listens to him, even when he understands something – e.g. gaming – better than her.  

Inevitably their unresolved real life issues come to the fore as they argue, and – unlike the games where you win according to how many you destroy – it is their life-affirming, constructive choices that tend to see them make progress. Except it’s not as easy as that. It gets a lot more complex.

Despite his teenage desire to be free of her nagging, he’s bereft when she disappears. Faced with three statues that each resemble her, he has to work out which is the real one in order to get her back. Then she plunges them into a situation that’s “not about pass or fail,” the ravenous Glutton informs them, “but what you’re prepared to sacrifice.” And only one may gain the key to escape …

It’s an intensely entertaining 55 minutes. Tarleton’s Rosie is perfectly pitched to push our buttons and warm out hearts. While the authentic speed and tone Weekes brings to Alex’s delivery sometimes makes him hard to understand (although my teenaged companions seemed to have no trouble), he captures the nature of this phase of life very convincingly.

As both actors navigate the physical and emotional territory with great skill, King and Sherratt work indefatigably in the background, as do lighting operator Ellis Thorpe and sound operator Kyle Potter.  

In the aftermath it’s worth conjuring with the resonances of the title. As granddad faces the ultimate end game, mother and son both have to end their game playing and communicate well to bring this phase of the game to an end and a new beginning. Morris and Callinan are to be congratulated for dramatising these truths of contemporary life so creatively. Likewise Capital E National Theatre for Children, for commissioning the play based on their one-page pitch and engaging Peters, King, Farr and McKendry to bring it to fruition.  

Billed as “an ideal first Downstage experience for 8 to 14 year-olds”, End Game is a play their parents will appreciate too. It plays to schools during the week, then twice more for the general public next Saturday before embarking on a national tour.
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