The Feast is three extraordinary pieces of creative theatre that have emerged from the 2014 Red Leap incubator programme.  Each course is quite different in taste, smell, ingredients and cooking technique.  The result is a creative meal of substance and delight. 

First course is an extraordinary mixture of reality, mask, and surreal action with a strange twist.  The Perfect Original – developed by Jess Holly Bates and directed by Robin Kerr – has a busy set with a couch, detritus of modern daily living, and cardboard cut outs for a partial backdrop, lots of branches, plastic bags and stuff.

It starts with the four Pakeha actors giving their whakapapa in English. Then it dives off to OE in Istanbul, then we are in the NZ bush with a cat and possum who shoot guns, then back to a dirty and dingy Kingsland flat and a very stuffed up young woman and her fish.

I must admit to being thoroughly confused trying to work out what this performance was all about! I wanted each of the bits to make sense within its creative world and link together.  However I now realize that was one of the major points of The Perfect Original: the world just doesn’t make sense. 

Each scene is a collision of ideas and social conventions.  Everyone is an alien.  The use of Māori tikanga mixed with Pakeha interpretation is humorous but also real.  It touches on the Kiwi desire for belonging and the chaos resulting from our anxieties. Jess Holly Bates plays a needy, vulnerable greenie with all the logical and emotional anxieties of a young woman searching for her ‘real’ self.  She has strange man in her life (Leon Wadham) who spins outrageous ideas into webs of recognisable reality and truth with deadpan precision and wonderful clarity. 

Victoria Abbott and Romy Hooper don the cat and possum masks and establish a strange creative world of hunting and killing to the tune of Maori Girl.  Again they are Aliens in our landscape.  It is strange but alluring. 

After a cup of soup and bread its back to a completely different empty set with a drum, guitar and bucket of water!  Directed by Ella Becroft and Lutz Hamm, Mr Nancy by Felix Becroft is a modern classic of physical story telling. Three actors – Felix Becroft, Fathe Testfamariam and Tawanda Manyimo – create the story-telling world with true ensemble spirit and energy. 

They tell the story of two gods: the Viking Loki (Felix Becroft), a face stealing trickster with power of fire, and the West African god Anansi (Fathe Testfamariam), the spider god and holder of knowledge of all stories. Both gods are ‘forgotten’ and dwell in the boredom of eternity inside the belly of a huge sea creature. A human scientist, played by Tawanda Manyimo, exploring the deep, suddenly arrives in their world and chaos ensues.  Fragments of ancient stories flash past as the trio use their powers to communicate. 

Loki and Anansi are filled with energy as they discover, torment and entertain their new arrival.  The scientist also has a few tricks which he creates with passion and delight, resulting in disasters.  The three actors explode with energy and precision as they jump, fall and cavort through a delightfully entertaining and enthralling performance. 

After another cup of soup and carrot cake it’s back to the theatre completely redressed with a full-stage white fabric screen and floor covering.  Starting with ants and bees, Sinoatrial by Robert Mignault, directed by Holly Chappell, explores chaos, synchronicity, the order of self-regulating systems and the amazing creation – the human heart. 

Robert Mignault guides us through a lecture exploring worlds of mutual support and individual responsibility with no overall leadership.  He concentrates on the extraordinary group of cells in the heart called the Sinoatrial. They are the ones that are the ‘electrical pacemaker’ and decide how your heart operates all those valves. You live or die because of these cells!

It is a thought-provoking and imaginative theatre piece.  Mignault has two assistants – Claire van Beek and William Robertson – who change the slides, cut the curtain, draw, prepare the operating theatre and finally assist in the heart operation which has a great ending.  They are both efficient, clinical and with little emotion turn the screen into a living piece of art.  Although the show is actually an illustrated lecture it is visual entertaining and stimulating. This piece could be developed as it touches on physical and spiritual elements that merit expansion.

Three new works developed and nurtured by Red Leap.  All three are quite unique explorations of our craft, imagination, style and taste.  A great theatrical meal… Can I have more… Please! 

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Now in its second year, The Feast has the potential to be one of the most important avenues for development of new work. Created through Red Leap Theatre’s incubator program, the company’s physical theatre devising process is used as a springboard for the development of new work from its participants.

The Feast marks the point the work is produced for a paid audience, and includes three works for one bargain ticket: The Perfect Original developed by Jess Holly Bates, Mr Nancy by Ella Beecroft, and Sinoatrial by Robert Mignault. While last year’s gastronomic metaphor included themed cupcakes to represent each show, and a special POP dining night, this year the artists are serving soup during the interval of each show to get the conversational juices flowing about the work. [More]

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer