I didn’t realise how much I missed the capital’s video stores – the way they make you slow down, search and gaze, before sitting together and watching your finds – until I watched Jonny Potts’ The Best Show is in Town at Your Place Every Night at Circa Theatre. …

His show comes before a short intermission, after which his best friend, Jean Sergent, comes on with her equally brilliant but very different one-woman show, Change Your Own Life.

The writer, actor and director shares so much about herself and her life that I admire her for her bravery and vulnerability. [More] 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

Billed under the heading Love, Death, and Videotapes as “Two tragicomedies [that] weave a journey of love and loss in Wellington”, Live Through This offers two very different approaches to navigating such slings and arrows.

In The Best Show in Town is at Your Place Every Night, subtitledLove, Death, and Videotapes, Jonny Potts conjures up the ghosts of our late-lamented video shops. Two black shelving units containing packaged videos and old film memorabilia sit beneath high-hanging signs: Horror, Comedy, Drama, Action.

Sartorial and suave in a suit of Wellington black, Jonny’s entrance under a black umbrella evokes Singin’ in the Rain, the 1952 movie that marks the transition from silent films to talkies in the 1920s – but I might be projecting here. He actually acts out the lyrics of Ben Lee’s ‘Hard Drive’ (but that’s not Evan Dando’s voice – is it sung by Johnny himself?) which bridges into Herman Hupfeld’s ‘As Time Goes By’ (made famous in Casablanca, 1942).

Jonny’s opening line suggests we are at a place of worship as he recalls the time when almost every suburb had a video shop. More a purposeful walk than a hard drive, he takes us to Island Bay, up Happy Valley Road referencing the Dump Shop en route to Brooklyn, down to fabled Aro Valley, up and over via The Terrace to Molesworth Street (he must be driving or he’d have cut through the Botanical Gardens), Lambton Quay, Courtenay Place, through the bus tunnel (hang on, is he on public transport or a flight of fancy?) and video-free Hataitai to Miramar, Seatoun, back round to Kilbirnie then over Crawford Road to Newtown.

Mostly the revered video shops are markers for a journey that’s about much more than them and their wares. Jonny’s poetic commentary is somewhat Dylanesque – hints of D Thomas and Bob D infusing quintessential Potts – as he arouses either memories or a new awareness of Wellington’s inner suburbs and linking roads, usually at night when the video shops are portals to the almost erotic experience of choosing a video to watch at home.

Although I get a bit lost at times, Jonny’s descriptors are often vivid and redolent – e.g. rusted staples in the wooden lamp posts of Aro Valley. Surprisingly he ends up in a small Newtown park with a cask of wine, proposing – to whom? I take it he wants to commit to a permanent relationship with the shops, which is tragic because he has already told us they only lasted for one generation.

First presented at BATS in last year’s Fringe, The Best Show in Town is at Your Place Every Night is a richly wrought love letter to a time gone by.

After interval, we find the shelving units adorned with flickering candles.

In Change Your Own Life Jean Sergent guides us through what the publicity describes as “a cosmic comedic journey of surviving and thriving through grief, chance, and self-sabotage.” And that’s exactly what we get.

Full of positive energy, wry observations and humour, Jean tells us she is a different person now than she was in 2016 when the unexpected and untimely deaths – just nine months apart – of a close cousin and flatmate, and her younger brother, turned her life upside down.

While what Jean did at the time, and how she has navigated the grieving process since, are idiosyncratically hers alone, the life lessons she shares cannot help but resonate within all of us.  

From raising questions like, “Who do you trust to clean out your bedside top drawer after you’ve died?”, stating “Truth and honesty are not the same thing” and riffing off three Tarot cards – Judgement, Strength and The Chariot – to declaring who and what she wants to be by delivering her own eulogy, Jean’s life-affirming wisdom and humanity shine through.

Meanwhile her consultations with a range of ‘New Age’ healers, her ‘Top Tips for Losing Your Brother’, her self-sabotaging responses to grief, and a revelation about how artist Tracey Emin tried to alter the course of her life, lead to her ‘Top Tips to Change Your Own Life’.

Wherever you choose to go in your personal ‘chariot’, you’re unlikely to head into your future ‘asleep at the reins’ after accepting this gift from Jean to Change Your Own Life.

Its first iteration was at BATS Studio in last year’s Fringe. In Lockdown it returned as a Livestream event then, in BATS’ Dome space, it was part of the 2020 Tahi Festival.

As a double-bill, Live Through This offers entertaining opportunities to engage with our own pasts, presents and futures. 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer