If the shows I’ve seen this week are examples of what’s on offer at the 2011 Auckland Fringe Festival then Auckland alternative theatre is finally coming of age – and it’s not before time. 

The Wrong Side sits firmly in the mainstream of fringe theatre works in that it is a conventionally scripted play performed in a room by actors saying lines that have been written for them and watched by an audience sitting in rows. The late, lamented Mervyn Thompson would have hated it … well, that’s what he would have said. Personally, I have my doubts about that. I think he would have secretly loved the intensity and the passion! 

Playwright and producer Stephen Lunt (UK) has crafted a clever 60 minute play that wrings our withers most effectively. Sadly, neither director nor actors are identified which is a shame as these roles are performed with great integrity and no small amount of skill. 

The story of two young boys, incarcerated by choice in an abandoned building, is allowed to unfold before our eyes through multi-layered narrative upon interlocking narrative until we don’t know what is truth and what is fiction.

The unravelling of plot using two voices – reflective recollection (often flawed) and standard storytelling techniques – is a path a well trod but Lunt manages to avoid all the common pitfalls while remaining committed to a linear mode of scripted recounting. This is highly intelligent stuff as it entices us in, makes us assess – and re-assess – what we are experiencing and has us always on the edge of our seats.

This particular quality always makes the drive home redolent with vibrant conversation and, since we took our eight year old with us, there was a legitimacy to this post-match discussion that was singularly refreshing. This was particularly germane as it related to adult actors playing children – always fraught – and what he, aged eight, would have done had the dragon (the threat from outside) actually materialised. Suffice to say he was most impressed with his evening, as indeed he should have been, for this is unashamedly a play about boys – about brothers – and their hot-wired need to provide familial care and protection. 

There are moments that are Pinteresque in their innate Englishness – the Yorkshire pud, the ‘seaside’, the safari park and the Scouse monkeys – but, somehow, this doesn’t jar with the strong antipodean voice that each actor brings to the piece. In some ways it enriches the experience as there is a universality in the narrative that finally, and tragically, unfurls and we feel it, and understand it, with every fibre of our being.

This is fine writing brought to life by performing of real authenticity and it draws us achingly and inevitably into an evaluation of what is truthful and what is real, not just in the play’s narrative but also as it applies to what happens in our theatres. There is denial, forcefully stated, and a power shift between the characters as they, with a predictability that shocks, take on the roles of their parents, thus enabling the facts to be finally and ruthlessly exposed and the fourth wall, so carefully maintained throughout, to be painfully broken.

It’s emotionally charged and intense stuff but liberally infused with humour and lashings of a sweet familial love that (almost) allows us to leave the theatre with our emotions intact. I say ‘almost’ because the otherwise excellent performances could benefit from trusting the silences intrinsic to the text and from exploring those sections where a quieter, more intense, vocal delivery would further illustrate the boys’ immense fear of being discovered. 

Lunt’s script is an excellent addition to the broader festival repertoire and deserves every opportunity for development and further production.