I thoroughly enjoyed tonight’s performances of Short + Sweet which is in stark contrast to my review of Week 1.

Varied, funny, clever, poignant and sweet in equal proportions the performers complemented each other creating a great mix of thought provoking dialogue.

In case you haven’t seen Short + Sweet before, it is the biggest little play festival in the world – produces hundreds of the best 10-minute plays from across the globe each year and 2012 marks the third year in a row that the festival has taken place in Auckland. [More]

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Compared with last week’s lineup, this week’s compilation of 10 10-minute plays for the Short+Sweet competition is a great success. There’s more to look at: action is dynamic, casts are larger, acting (mostly) more assured, props inventive and costumes bright. There’s more political bite, more conceptual risk-taking, more sexy sassiness.

Conception, birth and death all feature – humour ranges from juvenile to dark. Who has life choices, who doesn’t and who decides for others are questions for the evening. [More]
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The two Short + Sweet Wildcard sets each comprise ten eclectic works made up of last-minute entries, as well as some often-intriguing offerings from less seasoned practitioners. The overall show is inevitably going to be patchier than in the Top 20 sets, but who knows whether you may just be an unwitting witness to history in the making…

Ranald Hendricks’ title role as Philip With One ‘L’ by Alex Broun is a great icebreaker –it’s not until I read the programme afterwards that I even realise it’s a political satire on notorious Australian former immigration minister Philip Ruddock. To me it was just a weirdly charming character routine of a middle-aged man in a private school uniform playing with his red and blue matchbox cars, systematically eliminating vehicles of any other colour…

Despite having a cast of credible professionals, director/playwright Rex McGregor’s Taking the Plunge is an overacted, under-directed mess. Its apparent attempt to be quirky, clever and hilarious does not succeed, although actor Aaron Ward’s suit-top-and-stubbies ensemble deserves a best awful costume prize if there’s one going. The company also loses points for throwing a cake on the stage which takes most of a slow Nick Cave song to clean up rather than the allotted 30 seconds, leaving still enough residue to cause a handful of unscripted near pratfalls by other actors throughout the remaining first half. 

The next show, Bounce of the Rugby Ball, written and performed by Chris Molloy and directed by Leilanai Usana, provides more substantial fare. What starts off as a young adult’s amusing recollection of his bungled attempt to meet his favourite rugby player morphs into a bitterly mournful speech to the father he never met.

Carl Sorheim’s Punkis a fairly ambitious one-actor piece in which Kristina Hard plays a radical philosopher type looking to ‘fill the void’ left by the deconstruction of her delusional material existence. Director James Wenley gives us a competently performed if prosaic anti-establishment rant, let down a tad by a predictable and theatrically unsatisfying anticlimax. 

Kathryn Phyn’s direction of Mollycoddled by Georgia Symons (Australia) makes some interesting theatrical choices, whereby the cast (Moana McCartney, Lane Twigden and Katrina Rumbal) take turns relating their characters’ accounts of the literally overnight fall-from-grace of high-achieving golden-girl Molly while the others act out their narration in mime. Reasonable effort, could use more work.

The second half is notably stronger, beginning with Auckland City Mission’s Hobson Street Theatre Company in the only play I’m aware of in the entire festival that uses classic poetry for the script, namely James K. Baxter’s The Maori Jesus. Against a large white front-stage curtain, Bronwyn Bent directs an impressive and engaging play about a misunderstood, prophetic vagrant, performed entirely in shadow by Maeve, Shadow and Wilf, embellished by the haunting tones of traditional Maori wind instruments.

Leilani Unasa and Chris Molloy switch their earlier roles as playwright and director to produce Be Your Own King, amiably performed by Brian Rankin. A seventeen year-old’s secondary school essay effectively reads as a classically adolescent paean to his dream-girl Michelle, and transforms into a spirited imagined dialogue between them which results in the demise of true first love before it even got to happen.

Coincidentally, the next two shows deal in fairly differing ways with the passing of patriarchal figures. The first, Joanna Sheridan’s The Obituary directed by Mike Lowe, has Donogh Rees and Julia Croft as laid-back mother and uptight daughter, comically discussing the curious eccentric pastimes and relative indiscretions between Mum and her now two-years dead husband.

Then, in Celebration of Life, a newly-widowed wife and mother and her three children convene for the fancy-dress funeral of their estranged father, as per his dying wish. Director Kate Lumb applies strongly sympathetic characters, just absurd enough to be believable (as played by Brenda Kendall, Dan Veint, Rachael Blampied and Joel Herbert), to the tightly wrought script of Sally Sutton in which secrets are revealed that completely changes all their lives in ten hilarious minutes.

Finally, The Misguided Tour is an amusing, original and immersive piece by Aussie playwright Angus, directed by Anoushka Klaus. Mark Scott as Steve, a once recidivist, now reformed arsonist, tells us of his hapless life and the lessons it taught him as a preliminary to his torchlight tour through the prison he called home for several stretches. 

These wildcards have but one chance to impress judges (and audience) enough to get voted into the final. My own top pick was Celebration of Life, which I saw as the strongest contender against the other finalists, who have the advantage of having performed their shows more often.

So the Grand Final will include two wildcard entries, one from each set. With the general level of quality I’ve seen in the two that I’ve reviewed, it’ll be anybody’s game. 
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By the interval of the Short + Sweet Theatre Festival’s Top 20 (Week 2), I was already torn between two potential winners. By the end, I was pacing around the foyer, fretting over the ballot sheet. I had given 5 stars to four of the ten ‘shorts’ (10 minute plays). If only all voting were so difficult; with so many smart, witty, well-lit candidates.

Speaking of… candidates, my vote went to the superb John Key impersonator (Greg Goodyer) and agile ensemble in 13 Weeks. This political satire picks apart the proposed cuts to the Domestic Purposes Benefit and parodies the sexualized, dramatised media through pelvic-thrusting physicality by Lisa Brickell.

We don’t see enough theatre or comedy in New Zealand which deals with current affairs, and I voted for this piece in order to encourage this kind of socio-political satire in the NZ Arts. Despite giving it my vote, I think this piece would be better suited to a TV sketch show. Think The Thick of It meets The Daily Show. The group should be commissioned by TVNZ or TV3 to bring political satire to NZ stage and screen.

If my two companions hadn’t given Nic Sampson, Ryan Richards and Barnaby Fredric’s A Stitch In Timethe vote, I would have done so. As usual, Nic Sampson (in the lead) is sizzling, dazzling dynamite in this 10 minute musical where members of the Bomb Squad Academy procrastinate in song until they realise that none of them actually know how to defuse the bomb they have been called in to defuse. Composer Joseph Moore makes it sound like an age-old tune. Unashamed fun; pure talent in performance, production and writing (written by cast); I want to see more. Who knew Sampson could sing? His sidekicks… not so much, but Richards – the colour-blind bomb diffuser – makes up for it in comic physicality and stage presence. Another minute on the bomb ticker please!

Another short I wish was longer is The Cure, written by Ken Jones and directed by Thomas Sainsbury. A young, fresh, Kiwi take on Kafka, this story of a scientist who discovers the cure for cancer being brutally ignored and later trialled and convicted (of what, we do not know – other than putting wig-makers out of business) is perfectly choreographed by Sainsbury, and magically characterized by three actors playing multiple roles. The stand-out performance is by Elizabeth McMenamin, who handles Jones’ rapid-fire, perfectly-tuned script brilliantly, switching from deep-south seductress to Buowstin Loier-come-inmate seamlessly. Exciting New Zealand theatre.

Finally, A Formidable Contender for a Prodigious and Notable Endeavourstarts out as a fabulously realistic rehearsal for Chekov’s The Three Sisters, where committed actor Josev (Andrew Ford) is continually interrupted mid-soliloquy. The 10 minute sketch somehow ends up as an absurd all-in wrestling match with cast and crew. The only reason for this I can assume is to display some great stage combat skills, but really I was disappointed that The Outfit Theatre group didn’t take this more seriously. Nonetheless, I wanted to mention Andrew Ford for his brilliant, interrupted performance. If he is not already a serious up-and-coming, then there’s something wrong with the theatre industry.

These 10 shorts are showing until July 16^th at The Herald Theatre. If you want to enjoy and encourage some of the most exciting New Zealand theatre around, you know what to do.  
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Ten short plays by emerging actors take a conservative look at human relationships. It’s a little worrying how 10 10-minute plays, diverse in tone and genre, can give such a unified story of gender roles and relations as these first plays of the Short+Sweet competition.

The unorchestrated collective message is: women stay home, hysterical and prissy, and look after babies; men swear, go to sea, and live as “butcher king” predators and insensitive philanderers. Everyone is straight. [More]
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There are only three rules that I know of in this competition: 1) The works are original, 2) they are approximately, but no longer than, ten minutes in duration, and 3) the sets have to be placed and struck within 30 seconds each side. Everything else is up to the contestants, now go! 

The diverse collection could be sorted into two categories: those that appear complete unto themselves, and those that seem like they could be excerpts from a larger work. I don’t believe either is superior to the other in terms of choosing a favourite, as everyone is invited / entreated to do for the audience favourite awards section of the ultimate prize pool. The former kind is often satisfying, if sometimes more comedy-sketchy than dramatic or deep, while in the latter’s case to be left wanting more is a measurable indication that it is in some way compelling to be left wanting more. 

The first offering of the evening, Morning in Suburbia written by Bronwyn Elsmore and directed by Simon Ward, concerns a young first time mum-to-be at an ante-natal class of experienced mothers comparing horror stories in a disturbingly cheerful manner. While it raises a few quiet laughs, the direction lacks clarity and the overall performance lacks energy. Fortunately it transpires to be the least effective of the night. 

Writer/director Ben Van Lier has a charming wee character-driven comedy in Jack and Jill, starring Kate Lumb and Pete Coates in the title roles: wealthy, fitness-mad housewife Jill, who strikes up a passing friendship with sad-ass homebody with foot-in-mouth disease Jack,while they’re out jogging. The natural performances illustrate how easily anyone can delude themselves with impossible fantasies, against all logic. 

The lightheartedly bitter-sweetness of that play belies the visceral gruesome horror of the next one, Donkey Skin, a brilliantly awful one-person piece written by performer Virginia Frankovich and director Benjamin Henson, involving an abused girl who takes such extreme measures to escape as to make the Shawshank Redemption escape look like a walk in the park.

Pulling us back from the abyss is A Bit of a Blow, a twisted black comedy by Lynn Lobban about a middle aged married couple who evidently regard honesty above all else. As husband (Michael Morris) and wife (Emma Newborn) pleasantly and openly discuss the details of his after-work infidelities it’s apparent darker thoughts being concealed. Directed by Reynald Castaneda, it contains some of the evening’s best comic lines, e.g. “Oh, my dear husband!”, “Yes, I think so!”

Last play of the first half, playwright Therese Coolan’s Perfect is set in some kind of post-apocalyptic panic room, a mercurial metaphor for the earnest optimism of young love. Mike Dwyer directs amiable puppy-lovers Liesha Ward Knox and Coen Falke as Jack and Jill (!), examining the way one can invest all of their being into them, only to sabotage their own ideals by prompting each other to take issue with some aspect of their allegedly harmonious union. 

First of the second half, Game On is a hilarious and cute look at the amusing way three impoverished young flatmates (Lane Twigden, Gwendoline and Gracie Taylor) find to entertain themselves, mainly through relentlessly ribbing one another. Directed by Bruce Brown it’s great fun, if possibly inspired by nothing more than playwright Renee Boyer-Willsson’s desire for an excuse to list more than fifty euphemisms for the male appendage. 

Peter Larsen’s Lithium Kiss follows, in which what one might hope to be a charming romance turns out to be a pathetic, darkly amusing tragedy… just like real life, really. Rachael Blampied’s sweet-and-sour turn as a schizophrenic in a sanatorium is a performance highlight opposite Coen Falke (again), the only friend to visit her since her internship… we soon learn why.

The most abstract of the set, Shanty takes us out to sea and into the minds of two lonely shipwreck victims (Leigh Fitzjames and James Crompton), whose vocalised reminiscences and yearnings are silently echoed by six nimble dancers, under the excellent choreography of Zahra Killen-Chance. Intriguingly presented by director Jonathan Brugh, Keziah Warner’s poetic script confuses me a little; I’m not sure whether we’re witnessing two seperate tales or if they are in some way connected? 

Writer Gary Stowe may have borrowed the title for Outsourced from a recent popular American sitcom set in India, but the concept is quite different: High-powered female executive (Andi Crown) assigns her diligent secretary (Mikassa Cornwall) to arrange an escort to take her husband to dinner for their anniversary as she’s simply too busy and important. Simple but hilariously constructed as directed by Hera Dunleavy, I’m particularly tickled by the first few minutes of dialogue taking place via email despite their being seated at the same desk.

Because the World Needs Unicorns by Cerise de Gelder is an excellent piece to finish on. Eryn Wilson directs Simo Fillipo and Morgana O’Reilly as Noah and the desperate unicorn forlornly trying to secure passage on the fabled ark. Joined by Fraser Brown as the crafty dragon, the comic timing is matched only by O’Reilly’s fantastically naff costume: pink cardboard horn, pink dress, white cardy and tap shoes. 

…and that’s a wrap. Audiences get to pick only one favourite out of the ten… so which one did I choose? It was tricky as there was no single obvious standout, so I had to decide on criteria to choose in accordance with. I went with Donkey Skin, very much the former category mentioned above but in no way a comedy sketch, rather a disturbingly well acted grisly, gristly, putrescently classic horror that you really don’t want to continue.

Another night, by other criteria or in a different mood I might have picked any one of three or four of the others. Such is the inevitably fickle nature of voting in this fashion. What really matters is that on the whole, the powerfully driven and predominantly youthful collective energy of ten mini-companies makes for a fresh and exciting evening’s entertainment. 
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