The Toi Whakaari third year students’ Go Solo productions are an excellent opportunity to see some new talent in action, showing off their skills in vehicles of their own devising. This year they are being performed in the school’s Seeyd Space, offering a fairly blank canvas for creativity. Some choose to fill it with backdrop and set (the requirement that everything they use fit in a car seems to have gone), others choose to roam the blank space.

A quick perusal of the programme indicates Group C’s works will run the gamut from the deeply personal to the historical.

Chris Parker begins the Group C performances with No More Dancing in the Good Room, making excellent use of a standing lamp and his rubber face. Parker is interested in exploring how we remember and document our lives, and the piece focuses on his evolution as an actor. Despite the good start, I found this piece quite annoying – it was self indulgent, seemingly deliberately so, and Parker taunted us with post-modern references. Family home movies are well used, but the piece is punctuated by Parker storming on and off stage and shouting from behind a curtain. It was far too long and lost any semblance of structure in the middle, so it was quite odd when the performance bookended itself by returning to the device of Parker carrying out a conversation between 2 characters (father and son I think). Parker seems like a talented, if camp, performer, but perhaps not a strong original writer/deviser.

Next up is Lily Greenslade with her work Thora’s Collections. This piece is ambiguous, kooky and even a little bit scary. I couldn’t quite work out what was going on with Thora and her unusual friends. I find Greenslade a mesmerising performer, able to physically and vocally inhabit a number of characters and clearly delineate between them. Holding the focus of the audience on a blank stage is no mean feat and Greenslade manages to hold our attention and manifest her characters without props or costume changes. Although I feel this piece was not quite fully developed yet, it is highly imaginative and Greenslade is a delight to watch.

Elliot Wrightson, in The Wheelwork of Nature, plays two characters who are both fascinated with the mystery of energy and electricity: the famous scientist Nikola Tesla and an ordinary Kiwi bloke. For me this work is an example of evident research not yet fully turned into drama. There is too much factual exposition, and not enough exploration of the human element (for example, Tesla’s desolation or bitterness at being sidelined and discredited).

Finally Ana Corbett presents a sketch of an air hostess in The Holding Pattern. On the night I went I felt like Corbett might have been suffering from nerves or having an ‘off night’. This was a shame because I think the success of this piece depends on precision with lines and actions to show the repetitive nature of the air hostess’s job. Nevertheless, she manages to capture both humour and melancholy and the piece is refreshingly simple after the three multiple-character works that have preceded it. I have, however, seen more insightful portrayals of the nomadic lifestyle of flight attendants.

Group D also promises to cover a wide range of stories and subjects, with settings from Kohuratahi to New York.  

First is Sophie Kendrick, with Faith in Kohuratahi: her funny and sweet tribute to her Nan. She had the audience eating out of her hand from the beginning with her cheeky and casual approach. It feels extremely truthful and well thought out. This piece manages to be both a touchingly intimate portrait of Kendrick’s Nan and to convey a broader message about appreciating your elders. Kendrick’s flare for comedy is evident, especially when she delivers the withering refrain of her great grandmother, “Oh Faaaaaaye. You are trying. You are trying.” The work is subtly self-referential at the end.

Whale Saving Time, in an intricate work in which Adrian Hooke narrates the life of Jack (also playing Jack at various points) at breakneck pace, advertorial style. I think the beginning in particular owes a bit to American Psycho. Choosing third person narration as a device is risky as the audience can lack connection with the character and become bored or irritated. Just as the piece skirts the boundaries of this, a madcap third character is introduced that re-invigorates the piece and makes the risk pay off. The physical precision and energy displayed by Hooke is amazing. There’s a bit of Dr Seuss style philosophising near the end that strikes an odd note, and Hooke needs to realise that if he structures part of the performance around questions and answers it’s inevitable that a cocky audience member is going to answer back.

Emma Fenton’s Silke’s Big Day Out is a quirky tale employing physical humour and clowning. Imagine if Borat was an incredibly deadpan Eastern European determined to have a Samantha from Sex and the City experience in New York and you’ve just about got it. Just about … Fenton cleverly and hilariously uses props (especially a duck), although she never allows them to upstage her performance. Her characterisation is complete, and she could invoke peals of laughter with merely a wry smirk. Silke is bizarre but brilliant. Her adventures and guide to getting a “hot boy” had everyone in stitches.

Finally, Hayley Sproull is a wildly inappropriate teacher in Not in that context, of course, with the audience as her shocked class. When I first read that Sproull wanted to incorporate musical theatre into her piece, I inwardly groaned. She has found the perfect vehicle in a teacher wanting to be ‘down’ with students going through puberty and using music as a form of communication. This piece seems malleable for Sproull to improvise around the way the audience is reacting to her, as well as allowing her to perform her set pieces. The result is a work that feels as deliciously dangerous as the substitute teacher character at its centre. It takes great skill to remain completely in control of a work whilst giving the illusion of being totally out of control. I consider this piece has the best prospects for being developed into a longer solo work. In the meantime, I hope she releases a CD. Her final line (which I won’t spoil) is priceless.

It’s a tad unfair to compare the Groups, but Group D is uniformly excellent. Four very different works are presented that are funny, touching and at points downright bizarre. I got the strong sense that all four actors had set out to challenge themselves and incorporate different techniques into their work. They have all been rewarded with rapturous audience appreciation (a standing ovation on the night I went) for their extremely entertaining works of theatre.

The director’s note from Sophie Roberts and Jade Erikson states their hope that by going through the Go Solo process the soon-to-be-graduates can begin developing a way of making theatre that can sustain them beyond the school. What I think the evening shows is that devising is not for everyone and devising for the sake of devising shouldn’t be encouraged. I’m not sure I’d want to see all these stories on professional stages, but the Go Solo season offers the students a chance to give devising a go and find out what works with audiences.  
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Go Solo 2011 is the Toi Whakaari third year students’ solo performance pieces and comprises four groups with four students in each. The first two groups of these devised works show the actors making use of this opportunity to highlight their versatility and physicality, with most monologues employing multiple characters to display the students’ ability to use a range of voices and to use their bodies in a range of ways.

Directors Sophie Roberts and Jade Eriksen have kept the pieces simple but effective, sets are minimal but striking – a carpet is laid down, a world is made out of cardboard boxes – and light is used in diverse ways while never upstaging the actor.

Group A’s Hayley Brown starts the evening off with Good Gurll in which she plays a range of characters speaking into the microphone at a wedding reception. She does well keeping up banter as the audience are coming in and taking their seats and once she begins her monologue’s narrative is easy to follow. Most of her characters are clearly depicted – though the two men that she plays are difficult to tell apart – and she uses her microphone and stand cleverly and humorously.

Leroy Afford Lakamu’s Savage Island follows. This piece is an exploration into the history of Niue. Lakamu is charming, and the presence and subsequent playing of a guitar works well. The narrative of this monologue was not always clear and the piece as a whole needs more hooks to be entirely compelling.

Leon Wadham’s Gastronomy was a wild hit with the opening night crowd, provoking some of the most uproarious laughter this reviewer has heard in a theatre. At times, I confess, this was baffling and I couldn’t tell what on earth was so funny, but it must be said that I stood largely alone in that department. Wadham’s physicality is impressive and his comic timing impeccable; his performance confident and smooth.

Te Rina Thompson’s Ngahirata ‘unique like the thumbprint of a tree’ is an exploration of the life of “the grandmother [she] didn’t know” and closes group A’s performance. Thompson’s stage presence is at once calm and quietly confident, but at the same time her performance seemed to suffer either from nerves or from a slightly under-rehearsed quality.

Group B opens with Tawanda Manyimo’s What is this – some kind of joke? and points its finger at many of society’s injustices. At times this becomes a little preachy, which could have been solved with a tighter sense of the comedy of the piece. There were moments of humour but these often seemed forced and the timing of the comedy was not quite in sync with the piece. There is plenty of potential here that was not quite realised as its premiere.

Catherine Croft’s Love Me Do is one of the most enjoyable and well structured of the 8 monologues. Croft portrays two very different female characters each telling the story of a similar experience – one attending a Beatles concert and one a Courtenay Love concert. Various elements go awry and it is very funny (particularly the sherry in the shampoo bottle!). While Croft segues between these characters very successfully, with even her eyes changing as she changes character, nerves seemed to be a hurdle as she struggled a little with some of her lines.

Victoria Abbott’s Rare displays her ability to embody significantly different caricatures and her ability to perform comedy. They certainly are caricatures though, rather than complete human beings who appear three-dimensional. The connectivity between them needs finesse to tighten the piece as a whole.  

Finally we end with Phoebe Hurst’s Kung Faux: Call of the Siren one of the most enjoyable things I have seen onstage this year. Hurst is utterly confident and comfortable with her piece, her characters and the audience and is a comic genius! Playing a fake moustachioed cop ostensibly giving us training, her piece pays homage to Bruce Lee films, the Mighty Boosh, and “all things hammy and wonderful”. This is genuine laugh-out-loud and keep-getting-louder material. I look forward to seeing lots more in the future. 

It is always a pleasure seeing performances from third year Toi Whakaari students. The level of ability amongst these groups is high and we will undoubtedly be seeing lots more of them after they graduate.
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