By Spiro Zavos, Nick Bollinger, Justin Paton
Awa Press, NZ$24.99 | Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

DON'T LIKE RUGBY? Well, I didn’t have any time for soccer until I read Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. Spiro Zavos’ How to Watch a Game of Rugby might do the same for you with rugby. He combines an understanding of the game and its nuances (both technical and philosophical) with wit, intelligence and flair in his turn of phrase. He’s even endorsed by Greg “Foreskin’s Lament” McGee. Much as I was traumatised by rugbyhead boorishness at high school, I double as a rugby columnist in another life.

Silo Theatre
April 20-May 20 | Reviewed by Imogen Neale

ONE WORD: brutal. A few more? Confrontational, awkward, inspired, demanding and riotous. Welcome to sixteen versions of one night in Sydney, welcome to the life of a prostitute, an aids victim, a has-been musician with a pethadine habit and a costume designer who thinks she has adopted an alien; welcome, in other words, to The Jungle.

Circa Two
April 22-May 20 | Reviewed by Neil Furby

THE PROGRAMME notes said that a Drawer of Knives was a sexually charged surrealist thriller exploring each side of a triangular relationship. So was it? A ringing phone opens the play with a seated Russell (Paul McLaughlin sprawling on the seat staring upwards); a blood red couch, the only colour on stage, pulses with foreboding menace. The other two members of the triangle are quickly introduced: Denise (Miranda Manasiladis), Russell’s partner, and Sarah (Lucy Briant), the solo mum from the flat below. A comic scatter-gun dialogue begins.

Dirty Records
2006 | Reviewed by Imogen Neale

USUALLY, when you peel out the inside jacket on a new CD, the first feeling that grabs you is disappointment. For, of the selected few artists, especially hip hop artists, who chose to print their lyrics out for all to read, comprehend and memorise, most reveal that their songs pivot on a mere five or six lines. All that you thought you had heard, all that you thought the song meant, all that you thought it talked to; well, no, sorry, it’s just not there.

Auckland Town Hall, THE EDGE®
March 19 | Reviewed by Imogen Neale

THE PREMISE of this theatre-does-speed event, would seem, to even the most optimistic dramaturge (isn’t that in itself an oxymoron?), mad, messy and merciless. Take eight of New Zealand’s top playwrights and directors, marry them up with twenty-eight, equally talented, actors, give them two random props, split them off into eight groups, grant them permission to get mad theatrical and leave them to it for 24hrs. Then, when everyone is worn out yet well wired on sponsors caffeine products (Red Bull and Allpress) – give them the stage, an expectant (and paying) audience, ten minutes and the promise of a prize and see what happens.

Circa One
April 1-May 6 | Reviewed by Melody Nixon

JUST OVER a year after the death of Arthur Miller, Circa theatre brings us a scintillating rendition of his most celebrated play, Death of a Salesman. A classic almost from its inception, Death of a Salesman won Miller the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and has played in theatres and been taught in schools throughout the world since.

Luxembourg Gardens
April 5-22 | Reviewed by Imogen Neale

Stories Told To Me By Girls is not, strictly speaking, only produced and made possible by those people with their names on the credits page. Rather, as writer Julie Hill and Director Stephen Bain point out, it is a play whose narrative threads, quirks, charm, depth and frivolity are an amalgamation of stories that have, quite literally, been told to them by girls. However, while the press material may state that the play draws on woman’s stories, and that the way they are told, the way they focus on certain themes, the way they move is imbued with an essential womanness, I have to disagree. Most of the stories revolve around woman’s relationships with men – be they sexual, platonic or familial. Thus, the stories are as much about gender relations and roles as they are about a womanly essence; l'eau de hysteria.

SEEyD Theatre Company
Circa Two, Mar 11-Apr 15 | Reviewed by Melody Nixon

THOSE used to SEEyD Theatre Company’s thoughtful, quality works will not be disappointed by their latest offering, The Brilliant Fassah. Written by Tim Spite, James Ashcroft and Gabe McDonnell, this play is cleverly constructed, flawlessly presented and genuinely comic, with an engaging and creative use of props and theatre space. Its ending however is a little contradictory to the essence of the play, and feels slightly at odds with the earnest drive of the main body.

By Philip Roth
Vintage, $24 | Reviewed by David Levinson

REPORTEDLY the source for 1999’s your friends and neighbours rip, shit and bust-fest, Deconstructing Harry, Philip Roth’s Ghost Writer – surprise, surprise – hoists the yarmulka on post-WW2 Jewish artistic consciousness to provide a menacingly unbuttoned account of what makes it fly – namely an untuneful hashing of burdened uncertainty and greasy, rebellious self-entitlement. The protagonist (and literary alter-ego), is Nate Zuckerman, a young Jewish writer old enough to trade his own myth for pussy, but not yet old enough to stop believing in the myths of others. Dabbling in creative alchemy, Nate spins buried family turmoil into literary gold dust; but rather than the anticipated open arms and blood-wrought approval, it leads only to a splintering of personal relationships and the arrival at an ethical fork-in-the-road: to sell out, or not to sell out?

Music | Mar 11-Mar 13 | Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

Rain
I can hear you
making small holes
in the silence
rain

"I think film has an unstoppable power to convince if it’s properly made. When I was at school I wanted to be a film critic.” ALEXANDER BISLEY talks film with Robert Fisk, guest of the Writers & Readers Week at the New Zealand International Arts Festival 2006...[Read More] (links to The Film Reader)

Full credit to novelist R Carl Shuker. He's just won New Zealand’s largest literary prize, the biennial, princely $65,000 Prize in Modern Letters for The Method Actors. Lumičre likes his reviews, too. Associate Editor ALEXANDER BISLEY profiles the prize's previous recipient, Glenn Colquhoun.