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Not remotely connected, but I have just signed up to Spotify on the recommendation of a friend, and am cheerfully wandering through songs I haven't heard for ages. I looked up The Veils to see if their new album was out yet (no) and was deeply amused by Finn Andrews' bio, which I can only assume involved some careful leg-pulling, given the following sentences:
Devonport is a full ten minute ferry ride from central, downtown Auckland.
Anyway. To escape the ho-hum of my own country living (I'm at least another five minutes out), I've been going to plays.
A Night To Disemember, Wil Greenway. Monologue, the trials and tribulations of an Australian teenager who has his arm bitten off by a shark. And then the other arm. And then a meteorite crashes into his back yard (crushing the Hills Hoist) and turns out to be not only intelligent but made of a cheese-like substance that can be used to create fake limbs, and then there’s the mad dingo-riding stranger who steals our hero’s legs, and the grapes, and the attack crows, and the ex-girlfriend who ends up as a head on a skateboard… basically, this balanced surreality with narrative in just the right amounts, and did not at any point decide to let us know that It Was All A Metaphor (go on, ask me how much I hated Life of Pi). I am not a big fan of solo performances, but this worked for me.
Hui, Mitch Tawhi Thomas. In the middle of a storm four siblings reunite at the family house after the death of their father –Pita, ex-Mongrel Mob turned pillar of the Destiny Church, uptight and angry, Tamati, league star in Australia with a secret pregnant Singaporean girlfriend, Tina, trans (MTF) back from London where she fled years ago, and George, the youngest, intellectually handicapped and still at home, and the only one who cares what his father wanted. Which is not a traditional Māori funeral (I had wondered, going in, why this wasn’t called “Tangi”, and it turned out to be very deliberate), and this conflict underlies all the others between the siblings. Bob, the father, is present as well, in ghostly form, watching his children without connecting.
( More specifics, with vague spoilers. )
Cloud 9, Caryl Churchill. Sex, gender and colonialism, with a 25 year gap between the first act and second act in character age but 100 years in stage time, from the African veldt in the Victorian Empire to contemporary Britain. The actors shift as well – Betty in the first act, the ideal Victorian wife and barque of frailty (played, naturally, by a man) is played in the second act by the woman who played her son in the first, the Victorian patriarch becomes Betty’s daughter’s lesbian friend/lover’s enthusiastic toddler daughter, and so on. I’ve seen it before (same venue, actually) about ten years ago, and I have the script somewhere, and despite all that I’d still managed to forget the incestuous orgy in the second act. I remember the staging.
( Commentary, more vague spoilers. )
"[a] move to his grandmother's abode in Devonport, New Zealand (near Auckland) with his mother pointed Andrews in a different direction during his teeenage years. He frequented the local folk scene to escape the ho-hum of country living."
Devonport is a full ten minute ferry ride from central, downtown Auckland.
Anyway. To escape the ho-hum of my own country living (I'm at least another five minutes out), I've been going to plays.
A Night To Disemember, Wil Greenway. Monologue, the trials and tribulations of an Australian teenager who has his arm bitten off by a shark. And then the other arm. And then a meteorite crashes into his back yard (crushing the Hills Hoist) and turns out to be not only intelligent but made of a cheese-like substance that can be used to create fake limbs, and then there’s the mad dingo-riding stranger who steals our hero’s legs, and the grapes, and the attack crows, and the ex-girlfriend who ends up as a head on a skateboard… basically, this balanced surreality with narrative in just the right amounts, and did not at any point decide to let us know that It Was All A Metaphor (go on, ask me how much I hated Life of Pi). I am not a big fan of solo performances, but this worked for me.
Hui, Mitch Tawhi Thomas. In the middle of a storm four siblings reunite at the family house after the death of their father –Pita, ex-Mongrel Mob turned pillar of the Destiny Church, uptight and angry, Tamati, league star in Australia with a secret pregnant Singaporean girlfriend, Tina, trans (MTF) back from London where she fled years ago, and George, the youngest, intellectually handicapped and still at home, and the only one who cares what his father wanted. Which is not a traditional Māori funeral (I had wondered, going in, why this wasn’t called “Tangi”, and it turned out to be very deliberate), and this conflict underlies all the others between the siblings. Bob, the father, is present as well, in ghostly form, watching his children without connecting.
( More specifics, with vague spoilers. )
Cloud 9, Caryl Churchill. Sex, gender and colonialism, with a 25 year gap between the first act and second act in character age but 100 years in stage time, from the African veldt in the Victorian Empire to contemporary Britain. The actors shift as well – Betty in the first act, the ideal Victorian wife and barque of frailty (played, naturally, by a man) is played in the second act by the woman who played her son in the first, the Victorian patriarch becomes Betty’s daughter’s lesbian friend/lover’s enthusiastic toddler daughter, and so on. I’ve seen it before (same venue, actually) about ten years ago, and I have the script somewhere, and despite all that I’d still managed to forget the incestuous orgy in the second act. I remember the staging.
( Commentary, more vague spoilers. )
