At the Hamish McKay Gallery, MARK AMERY connects the dots at the One god, no masters group show.

MARK AMERY discovers a cachet of emerging New Zealand photographers at Wellington City’s Photospace.

Bats Theatre, Shed 11
Oct 17-26 | Reviewed by Ewan Kingston

THIS PLAY... or should I say these plays... or should I say the version of this play I saw... whatever it is... is fresh, delightful and exciting theatre. It also feels kinda strange recommending a theatre experience that has a 50% chance of being very different from what I experienced.

By Airini Beautrais
VUP, NZ$24.95 | Reviewed by Laura Fergusson

PROSE POEMS are a difficult genre to market. They sound like a contradiction in terms, or an attempt to cross too many boundaries. But those borders, the hinterland of literary definition, are inhabited comfortably and without pretension by Airini Beautrais.

By Michele Amas
VUP, NZ$24.95 | Reviewed by Laura Fergusson

IT IS RARE that one reads a book of poetry at a sitting. Usually the pleasure comes from the potential to dip and savour individual poems, and the satisfaction they give as distinct entities. I’m sure I will return in this manner to After the Dance, but on first encounter it draws the reader sufficiently into its emotional space that it is hard to put down. Without the artificiality of a plot, Amas leaks information gradually through her writing which compels the reader to build a picture and become engaged in her world.

Circa Theatre
Oct 14-Nov 11 | Reviewed by Joe Sheppard

IT WAS A happy coincidence: the NZSO filled the Te Papa marae with the sounds of Peter and the Wolf, while later that evening, across the courtyard, Prokofiev was joined by Shostakovich and Master Class opened its season at the Circa Theatre. But it was more than mere chance that the production featured key players who were behind the show when it received remarkable acclaim twenty years ago, and that many of those fulsome quotes – pulled from the contemporary reviews for advertising – were also worthy of the new Master Class.

Peter Madden’s dramatic, surreal installation art makes space at City Gallery Wellington this week, reports MARK AMERY.

By Matt Johnson
Longacre Press, NZ$30 | Reviewed by Simon Sweetman

Overdue New Releases is the debut novel from Matt Johnson, a former freelance film critic for the Evening Post and Dominion.

Johnson has a flair for writing very natural dialogue – and the book cracks along at a decent pace (many readers will find it easy to read in a single sitting, or two – and that’s not the fault of the book at all; that is to say this is not a slight read, just an enjoyable one). But as good as Johnson can be, he is guilty of that classic crime of over-reaching, something that happens so often in first novels by New Zealand writers; particularly when favouring the first-person – essentially autobiographical – narrative voice.

Parallel existences and the exploration of being both here and there manifest in the work of contemporary New Zealand artists living in Berlin, writes MARK AMERY.

Bats Theatre
Sept 28-Oct 14 | Reviewed by Melody Nixon

ROYAL Physician Sir William Gull wants to ‘chisel his deeds into the conscience of humanity’. A nice, if slightly grandiose metaphor, you might think. Sadly no; what Gull wants to chisel is something more flesh-like than a nice metaphor. This is Britain in the literal nineteenth century and the conscience, according to Gull, is stored in the frontal lobe of the brain.