Love hits us all in different ways. You can’t help who you love. Sometimes you regret who you love. Sometimes what you love is as singular as you are. Tiny Deaths explores the fringes of love – sometimes unexpected, obsessive or painful – through a series of monologues.

Uther Dean has written a fabulous script. It is startling and impetuous and just plain weird. While the experiences these monologues reveal might be outside the usual frame of reference for a lot of us, depending on your taste in tentacles and stationery, it is still somehow accessible.

The script is completely hilarious in the most twisted way. You feel the smile stretch your mouth and mid-sentence your smile is caught, oddly frozen as the dark implications of the words sink in.

Alison Embleton has made some very wise decisions about this production. First, to put it on: the South Island premiere. Second, to leave the performance space as stripped back as possible, with only a symbolic seat and ambient noise to furnish it. This allows the strange and melodic words to ring and fill the space. Third, her casting is impeccable. Embleton wanted actors able to express strong unique characters who would compel you to listen and she could not have found better people to do this. 

In her first monologue Mikayla Cahil is a bomb. Anyone who touches her gets obliterated. She is not always sorry about this. Her second monologue enumerates every action in her day. Waiting for the tiny envelope to appear. Listing her regrets. Entire chunks of the audience nod along and heartily sympathise as they see their own experiences on the stage.

Courtney Drummond expresses her hate for happy couples in a wedding toast. It is a sardonic speech filled with delicious hyperbole. Her laughing goblin face is delightful.

Katherine Kennedy sits and tells her parents, with the aid of cue cards, about her love for a squid. She hits the perfect balance between completely awkward and completely hilarious. 

Marea Colombo has several monologues in this play and they all demonstrate her range and her skill. She opens the show sharing a profound and fathomless love for stationery. She will kill or seduce for its beautiful efficiency. Her next monologue somehow turns a gag-worthy experience with a tape worm into something that transcends life and death. She ends the show by working through the complex array of emotions on discovering a sex tape of oneself has unknowingly been filmed and shared on the internet.

Counterpoint has been a little quiet this year. Embleton has put them back in the game with this passionate production. The final line states that “it is not enough,” and Colombo is right. Once is not enough. I want to see it again. 

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