From February 2010, The Lumičre Reader will publish from its all-new website. This existing website will remain online in an archival capacity until we relocate its content.
By Janet FrameRandom House, NZ$30 | Reviewed by Joan Fleming
JANET FRAME wrote, “The truth is always painful to extract whether it be truth of fact or fiction.” In her posthumous novel, Towards Another Summer, that pain is liquid, like a river she can’t step out of – eddying the reader along on the flotsam and jetsam of her richly littered inner world.
The super bright Fringe 2008 programmes are now available, after being released at a packed official launch on Thursday January 24 attended by the Hon. Judith Tizard and Kerry Prendergast, and MC-ed by Vinyl Burns. This year’s Fringe looks to be as action packed as previous years, with a wide variety of dance, visual arts, comedy, music and theatre shows on at various venues around Wellington. It’s a great chance to see experimental shows featuring fresh talent. Fringe Addict cards will be available again, with discounts to Fringe shows as well as hospitality and retail stores around Wellington. The programme is available on the Fringe Festival website, fringe.org.nz, where you can also sign up for Newsletters and a new feature, Fringe Txt alerts. Look out for the programmes at venues and stores near you!—Helen Sims
Circa TheatreJan 25-Feb 2 | Reviewed by Helen Sims
UPON WALKING into Circa One for Rabbit you notice several things that are out of character for the main auditorium at Circa Theatre. Firstly, the seating block has been altered to be in a “theatre in the round” style (where the audience sits on all 4 sides of the stage). Secondly, the set is downright stylish, accented with incredibly “now” blue and red lights. Set designer Brian King has done an excellent job of creating a modern, trendy bar atmosphere – assisted by playing Dirty Three as the pre-show music. A large, glass, multi-sided table dominates the centre of the stage – this is where Bella, or Rabbit as she is affectionately known, will convene with a disparate group of her friends for an evening. It also happens to be the night her father is dying in hospital...
SAM SEARLE lives and works in Wellington. She is currently enrolled in the Iowa Workshop (Poetry) at the International Institute of Modern Letters.
PHILLIP PANTUSO is a senior at the University of Texas, Austin, and “Everything You Hold Dear” is his first published story. He hopes to attend an MFA program in the near future and make fiction-writing his work as well as his play. He’d like you to note that he did not vote for George W. Bush, like most of his state did.
BATS TheatreJan 25-Feb 2 | Reviewed by Helen Sims
Ground is set in an idyllic Otago camping ground and centres around Hon and Darl, a couple who have been coming there for years and have finally snagged the perfect spot. The play is split into five scenes and examines what happens when Hon and Darl’s possession of the plot is challenged by a large camper van with mysterious occupants that arrives in the dead of night and blocks their view. The play is light hearted in tone, but prompts a consideration about our possessive tendencies towards property, particularly land. Hon and Darl never contemplate a compromise that would result in their sharing the plot and view with the strangers they consider to be intruders. Instead they scheme in increasingly frantic fashion a way to re-establish their territory. In doing so they sacrifice their much longed for holiday.
TIM G recites his itinerary of bands at Auckland’s Big Day Out, 2008.Cut Off Your Hands: Cut Off Your Hands were awarded a main stage billing and they proved to be a sensation. I was apprehensive as to how these indie rock cats would convert to a large outdoor stage but they played as if they owned it. Their singer pranced the stage boldly while the band belted out gem’s like ‘Oh girl,’ ‘Closed eyes’ and a fantastic ‘Still Fond.’ Great way to kill the morning slumber, they sounded fantastic.
Choosing wisely, MATT PICKERING made a beeline towards Arcade Fire at Auckland’s Big Day Out, 2008.WIN BUTLER: “You should get the Queen off your money!!” The lead singer of Canadian band Arcade Fire perhaps felt an affiliation with his Kiwi audience which, like Canada, is beginning to question its ties to the monarchy. Apparently he’s used to wearing his political opinion on his sleeve, and he’s a big Obama fan too.
Circa TheatreJan 18-Feb 16 | Reviewed by Helen Sims
Armslength starts off in story book fashion, with the actors telling a story about an ambitious young woman, who wants a lot of things that can’t happen at the same time. She goes to live on the top of the world, so that it can revolve around her. Thus begins a play which manages to balance two poles – the literal and the figurative; the story told and the story shown, with great skill.
Downstage TheatreJan 19-Feb 16 | Reviewed by Kate Blackhurst
TIM SPITE and the SEEyD Theatre Company have attempted to address the issue of paua poachers with their latest play with a political message. Although Spite, actor and director, claims he doesn’t do ‘issues theatre’ there is clearly a moral in this production – the problem, or the challenge, (depending on your perspective) is to work out what it is.
Downstage TheatreJan 19-Feb 16 | Reviewed by Helen Sims
THE SEEyD Company, helmed by Tim Spite, have a talent for taking issues that although topical, do not seem conventionally dramatic, such as child immunisation or wind farming, and turning them into gripping plays. The key to their success is both a thorough exploration of both sides of the issue without finally imposing a “correct” position and investing the story with realistic human experiences. Rather than exploring the issue at a national or international level, they show us a more intimate human face in the form of a community or even a single family struggling with it in their everyday lives. In Paua they fail to do this. The result is a show that fails to investigate the issue adequately and also fails to provide characters and storylines with which the audience can engage with in order to remain interested. The messages are as mixed as the ones received by the confused clairvoyant who briefly features and ultimately the moral dilemma was only weakly pursued. This was a shame, as the issue of eco-terrorism seemed ripe with possibility for the type of theatrical exploration SEEyD has provided in the past.
BATS TheatreJan 23-Feb 2 | Reviewed by Kate Blackhurst
THE TINKLES want to be New Zealand’s equivalent of The Wiggles, or Hi-5, and this ‘mockumentary’ style theatre charts their success, or lack of it, in a high-paced energetic play for grown-ups.
SARADHA KOIRALA shares her experiences of Auckland’s sweltering Big Day Out, 2008. WHEN FINDING one’s way to the Big Day Out it pays to follow clusters of young people wearing hats, jandals and backpacks. Such a cluster leads us to a packed bus and gets us in the mood for crowded excitement.
Edited by Harvey McQueenGodwit/RH, $34.95 | Reviewed by Simon Sweetman
I HATE GARDENING. Hate it! I used to fight and argue over mowing the family lawn when I was at school. Flash forward to my own time as a home-owner and I have finally discovered the joys of round-up. That’s my one all-purpose mowing and gardening tool. If you’re in my garden, bug or not, you will be sprayed.
BATS TheatreJanuary 15-19 | Reviewed by Helen Sims
OTCAPOHCTMAHYL is based on the book by the same name by Richard Meros, which was written when “Aunty Helen” had been the PM for 6 years. Described by Meros as “ridiculous”, Pinfield and Meek have thankfully mined the more humorous and pointedly political content from the book to create an excellent stage play, with extra resonance given it is election year and shortly Helen’s political neck will be on the block. It’s less of a play in the conventional sense as a post-modern power point presentation. We are skilfully guided though the carefully constructed presentation by Meek, playing Meros, in order for him to persuade us of his point – that Helen Clark is in urgent need of a young lover, and the only viable candidate is him. The logic takes some magnificent leaps at some point, but there’s no denying the force of his argument. It’s also the cover for two other thinly veiled messages – the rampant individualism amongst 20-somethings as a product of the “Rogernomics” of a government which Clark was a part of, and the portrayal of Meros as a self-obsessed loner, the “poster-kid” of this generation. Ask not what you can do for your country, but what you can do for yourself!
San Francisco BathhouseJanuary 16 | Reviewed by Diane Spodarek
Billy Bragg can’t sing. Or so he said. His actual words from the stage, “I get by.”
Political songs, stage presence, two electric guitars, a capo and his motor mouth all came together for a very satisfying good time. Bragg likes to tell stories, many humorous and political. He’s called a political performer but his genial rants are about justice and if that’s Radical Left, then so be it. I didn’t mind his rants, mainly because I agreed with everything he said. Bragg, from the UK, is an old Clash fan and his punk roots were loud but clear as he segued from his hard core punk songs to more recent songs of love and loss in relationships and in society. His fans know all the words to every single song. My friend “A” and I seemed to be the only ones in the room who didn’t sing along. When Bragg lost his place in more than one song, the audience kept the lyrics going.
Angela Andrews has just released her first book of poetry, Echolocation. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University. She’s also a doctor, daughter, wife and mother of two. So how does she fit it all in? RENEE LIANG caught up with Angela by email (which required Angela to wait until the kids were asleep, and to liberate the computer from under a pile of ironing...).
BATS TheatreJanuary 10-19 | Reviewed by Kate Blackhurst
IN THE Bacchanals latest production, the life and poetry of John Donne is given the Blackadder treatment of history, in which salacious rumour and humour is preferred to cold hard facts. It is set at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but the comedy comes from the liberal sprinkling of anachronisms and the modern style of acting. In this historic pastiche, Simon Vincent has given real people a contemporary twist.
BATS TheatreJanuary 10-19 | Reviewed by Helen Sims
BLASTING the Sex Pistols as pre-show music proved to be an apt warm up for A Renaissance Man – it mostly features sword fighting, anarchy and sex. The show begins with a voice-over taking us back to 1599 and introducing us to the dire scene of Henry Donne about to be martyred for his Catholic faith in Protestant England. He is visited by his brother John (the ‘Renaissance Man’ in question, played by Phil Peleton) and a scene of despair, marked by stilted dialogue unfolds before Henry is dragged off. This is about as serious as it gets however. We soon learn that John is a lover not a fighter, and has been using his poetic abilities mostly as an aid to seduce various strumpets around London. The crazy Sir Philip Sidney, Chief interrogator for Queen Elizabeth uses John to deliver a cycle of appalling poems to his muse, Stella, and as an informant. However, the shady, hooded Catholic figure Edmund Campion, wants to enlist him to fight for the same cause as his brother. In addition the equally mad Earl of Essex (husband to Stella) also has plans for John as he seeks the throne. John just wants advancement, so he has to play all sides to try and increase his fortune. Add into this the flighty but quite cunning aristocratic Anne More, who only wants a wedding day, and John is in rather a mess. At the end of two hours this mess is (mostly) untangled.
In 2008, CRAIG CLIFF aims to write one million words. That’s like writing War and Peace, twice. Sort of. You can follow his progress here.
PIP ADAM is a prose writer who lives in Aro Valley, Wellington. She has recently completed the MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University. Previously, her work has been published in Hue & Cry, Turbine and Glottis.
LAWRENCE PATCHETT met Laurence Fearnley at her mother’s Christchurch home shortly before Christmas to discuss her latest novel, Edwin and Matilda, and to find out how the author of six novels hones her writing craft ‘in secret’.
In alphabetical order, Lumičre Books Editor AMY BROWN lists ten books from 2007 that she continues to think about.
Further reflection on the music year that was: GEOFF STAHL lists his ten best albums (plus a few more), while KIRAN DASS chimes in with an alternate top five for 2007.
Dunedin Xmas Pantomime 2007Dec 20-22 | Reviewed by Renee Liang
THE PANTOMIME is one of those joyfully wacky British traditions (like cricket) which is sure to puzzle any hypothetical aliens watching us at Christmastime. But since I was in Dunedin and had never seen a pantomime, and my friend said she was in one, I borrowed some children and went.
RENEE LIANG, during her southern sojourn, is taking the time to hobnob with all kinds of writers, artists and assorted layabouts. One of the rarer species she found was a pantomime writer, Greg Macleod. Not only is Greg the writer of the Dunedin Xmas Pantomime for the third year in a row, but he’s also an actor, musician, closet painter and all-round creative genius. Definitely one of the Deep South’s better-kept secrets.
Bar Bodega, Room 101December 22 | Reviewed by Tim G
Timothy Blackman is an impassioned and captivating artist live. The night’s performance – for the release of Modern Sprawl – was obviously an intimate affair; two days out from Christmas, this was not an opportune time for such a gig and it seemed that mostly friends and family hugged the walls to see Blackman in his hometown.
Lumičre Music Editor BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reminds us of a stellar year in music, both locally and abroad, followed by his ten best albums for 2007.
JOAN FLEMING recently completed Victoria’s MA in Creative Writing. She received the Biggs Poetry Scholarship, and was the assistant editor for Turbine 07. She writes, lives and works in Wellington, in that order.
CY MATHEWS is a postgraduate student at the University of Otago. His work has also been published in the 2003 OUSA Literary Review, Critic magazine and online at Oban 06 and Deep South.
MARIANA ISARA recently finished an MA in Creative Writing at the The International Institute of Modern Letters.
Sidebar
