Family issues erupt in At The Wake, with hilarious and dark consequences. Is it ever appropriate to discuss your sex life at a funeral? What if you are 70, and it's your own daughter's funeral?...
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This is a play about trying to find that slippery middle ground between being totally overwhelmed by the wealth of the worldʼs problems, and being totally ignorant to their undeniable existence....
Cast: 6
Set during the late night shift at a fast food joint. Jo has just been made the new duty manager while Ian is simultaneously love sick and working the drive through. There’s mysterious Maryanne...
Cast: 8
We begin with a monologue by Sparky Richards about how much she hates Auckland, but how she ultimately loves it because all the people she loves are there. But she wishes it was better.The main...
Cast: 9
An all women team use a cartoon approach to look at the worries/myths/laughs we all know and secretly share about our body image.
Cast: 12
August Moon loses her mother one day. The event would not normally carry great significance but August’s mother isn’t any old mother. She is a famous mother, a Member of Parliament who has been...
Cast: 6
NZ during the birth of broadcasting 1910 to 1960. A wildly uplifting musical about a woman who became a legend in her own lifetime. Larger chorus possible.
Cast: 9
FOCUS: THEATRE AND DRAMA IN NEW ZEALAND
Published April 1991
ARTICLES
Simon Garrett: Plays, playmakers and...
There is a growing body of research about what life is like for people with disabilities who have spent most of their lives in institutions. However there is very little written by the people who...
Cast: 3
The town of Omoana seems to be dead except for its annual hui financed by the town's one celebrated son, Matt Paku, a doctor in Auckland. But in his latest letter to his father, it appears that...
Cast: 18
Four students with very particular character traits are set to complete a group assignment that turns out to be much bigger than any of them had suspected. An apocalyptic comedy with extraordinary...
Cast: 5
At the foot of the Urewera ranges lies Awhi Tapu, a desolate forestry village. With the forestry industry closed down, the people of Awhi Tapu have left. Wendyl, Sonny, Casper and Girl Girl have...
Cast: 4
BabyCakes is a character-driven no-nonsense comedy about trashy weddings, a call centre, and people that are overly bent on being normal. And cake. Lots of cake. Mmmm cake.
...
Cast: 4
Teenager Zaria, sent by her Montenegran parents to live with relatives in New Zealand, struggles to perform well in her all-girls school where institutional and peer group understandings challenge...
Cast: 23
Sibling rivalry on the boards. The Quigley brothers battle their way through The Two Faces of Casanova. Who has desecrated the autographed photo of Ken Branagh?
Cast: 2
"Dancing is dangerous, it has the power to disturb, subvert and confront, and it puts us in touch with the very rhythms of life."
In Backwards in High Heels a middle-class couple, Holly and...
Cast: 4
Spike Milligan's all-time favourite story comes to life in this version by Tim Bray. Share Tim and Rose's madcap adventure through the great black forest and into Badjelly's castle.
Cheer...
Cast: 6
A lively adaptation of Spike Milligan's popular children's story. Tim and Rose go off in search of their cow Lucy who has been stolen by the wicked Badjelly and her giant servant Dulboot. On the...
Cast: 8
If Lonely Planet says ‘don’t go’, you’ll always find a Kiwi backpacker who’ll take no notice. So here he is in Iraq.
Two Kiwis, two Americans, two Iraqis, a...
Cast: 6
A macabre farce about a mother and father who live off the immoral earnings of their son, whose clients are disposed of by the mother.
Balance of...
Cast: 5
The Barbarian tells it like it is, her comments on social and cultural attitude is shocking and blunt as well as delicate and romantic.
"Banging Cymbal, Clanging Gong is as head-on and...
Cast: 1
What do a Samoan student, retiring police officer, a gym babe, a fast food worker, a twelve year old girl, an American and a Robin Brookes Personal Trainer have in common? Laid bare, they're all...
Cast: 2
A wry anarchic farce about women with a passion for passion. Angelica and Josefina's widowed Mama tries to talk sense into her highly-strung daughters. And another man comes knocking at the front...
Cast: 4
Barefoot on Queen tells the story of young Leo, who has found himself with a headache on the very empty intersection of Queen and Victoria streets in Auckland.
There he encounters...
Cast: 4
Three months alone in a basement.
Food is running out. Water's running dry.
His strength is fading.
And he's sure he's not alone.
Basement, a one-man show, is the story...
Cast: 1
Six seminal plays from Ken Duncum and Rebecca Rodden, whose playwriting partnership powered the vibrant theatre scene round Wellington’s BATS Theatre in the 1980s and 90s. Boldly inventive, darkly...
From Charles Darwin to Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx to Mr Twit, it is said that the secret to power and greatness is all in the size and shape of the beard. This is a tale of one young girl’s...
Cast: 3
A road trip turns into a nightmare when three siblings break down in Kaitangata. The locals are strange. The food is stranger.
Up to 16 characters
Cast: 6
In their pursuit of the ultimate high, writer Jack Kerouac and con artist/car thief Neal Cassady leave New York for Mexico, accompanied by a soundtrack of cool Jazz, conversation, amphetamines and...
Cast: 2
The classic story adapted for the stage by an outstanding playwright for young audiences.
Cast: 4
Becky Sawyer is tidying up after a class reunion to celebrate the beginning of the twentieth century. Her husband Tom is thrilled when his old friend Huck arrives. But Becky would rather leave...
Cast: 3
Nine people relive their high school experiences.
There are two narrators who can be played by either sex.
Cast: 11
Aiden is invited back to his home town in Palmerston North to run a ‘Branding Strategy’ for the City Council. His plans go awry, however when he meets a ghost who died in a fire in Himitangi in...
Cast: 27
"...Before the Birds and The River demonstrate Angie Farrow's ability to humanise global political crises, and to use the symbolism and poetry of theatre to promote debate about...
A control-freak actor, a sex-crazed celebrity obsessive and a socially phobic fan fiction writer have one thing in common: Benedict Cumberbatch. When they hear that Holmes/Kahn/Smaug is making a...
Cast: 3