Strap into your seat and prepare for a wild ride. This is not your ordinary comedy thriller. Beginning in a cottage in Dartmoor, the air is filled with the hint of adultery and murder. What unfurls is a mystery that even the greatest sleuth would struggle to solve. Leaving you perplexed at almost every moment, you are going to need a warm footbath of Epsom salts to help process this one.

As quoted in Accomplice, ‘Stan Slavsky’ once said, “a single prop can ground an entire show”. Each of Megan Laybourn’s props has a significance and believability that, without spoiling the plot, grounds us deeply in the unfolding narrative.

Jack Thompson’s set is, like the show, full of surprises and feels very homely; fitting considering this is to be the house of the incredibly content married couple Derek and Janet Taylor. There is absolutely no tension between them (or anyone else) at all… Not one bit!

“Expect the unexpected, and you won’t be disappointed” is an apt description provided by the president of Wellington Repertory Theatre, Kevin Hastings. This show relies on many twists and turns to engage the audience, and all four actors do such a fantastic job of suspending reality to allow for these to happen.

It is difficult to compliment the cast members individually without spoiling character truths or important moments, but Jonathan Ensor, Catherine Pryce, Kevin Hastings, and Phoebe Day are fantastic at playing terrible actors. All their performances are incredibly believable in a very meta way. It’s not often that the person responsible for ‘public announcements’ is credited in the programme, let alone mentioned in a review; however, I feel that Gary Hollier deserves a particular commendation for their work.

Filled to the brim with surprises, Accomplice makes it hard to distinguish what’s real and what’s not. This suspenseful slow burn is sure to be all the rage in Wellington, just as it is in Crawley. Ensure you book tickets to the final show of Wellington Repertory Theatre’s centenary season as soon as possible, or else your fate may be left to poison, knives, hairdryers, or other such devices.

Midge Ure is primarily known as a new wave and synth-pop artist, formerly of the bands Ultravox and Visage. As well as being a successful singer-songwriter and record and video producer, he is also an accomplished guitarist, temporarily joining hard-rock band Thin Lizzy in the late 1970s. This concert had been delayed a year due to Ure’s health issues, and the full-house audience were certainly more than ready to party!

Support act Cole Stacey, whose strong vocals and energetic mandolin-playing folk songs were the perfect warmup, is also a member of Ure’s touring band. His version of Mary Hopkin’s Those Were The Days from 1968 was a highlight, with many of the audience in full voice showing their generation.

30 minutes later, Ure together with Stacey (keyboards, bass, backing vocals), Russell Field (Ure’s long-time drummer) and Joseph O’Keefe (keyboards, violin) arrived on stage to rapturous applause.

The first song Dear God set the tone for the night. Again We Love blended into Call of the Wild, after which Ure said, “I have to apologise, we’re a wee bit late – about a year!” On Passing Strangers, the audience were encouraged to clap along. The huge solo hit If I Was followed and had the crowd singing the choruses. Ure commented on the venue’s unique design: “We’ve never played in half a yacht before!”

After the gorgeous Tom Rush ballad No Regrets, Ure said (with a hint of sarcasm), “Isn’t it classic that something I didn’t write gets the best applause!” The heavy guitar-laden Led Zeppelin-esque Monster segued effortlessly into crowd-favourite Vienna, featuring a stunning violin solo by O’Keefe.

Reap the Wild Wind again had the crowd in full voice as did Fade To Grey, with Ure switching from guitar to keyboard. For Dancing with Tears in My Eyes, the band quietened down for the crowd to sing the choruses on our own! This was a band clearly enjoying themselves, and Ure happily engaged with the adoring audience.

The first encore, the instrumental Yellow Pearl, led beautifully into the final song Hymn. Then it was over, the crowd leaving tired but sated.

From the team that brought us Transmission and Transmission: Beta comes After God, a new verbatim play described by its writer Stuart McKenzie as a “mash-up of philosophical dialogue, medieval morality play, divine comedy, and absurdist drama in the spirit of Waiting for Godot”. For an audience, it’s a high-energy theatrical machine gun of ideas marshalled by a disciplined and beautiful production design and imaginative direction.

With a hungry mind and burning questions, McKenzie (mostly Andrew Paterson) hits the road, travelling from Wellington to Kathmandu, London, and New York. Along the way, he encounters a vivid cast of real-life characters: theologians, Tibetan rinpoches, philosophers, cosmologists, taxi drivers, hotel receptionists, a famous singing nun, and his own mother. Each has their own radically different way of making sense of human existence. As he travels, he is in constant conversation with theologian Mark C. Taylor (Michael Hurst), the author of the play’s subtitle, ‘Hope is an act of defiance’.

Assisting the two leads who expertly anchor the narrative are Kali Kopae, Roy Clark, and Tara Canton, who all do stellar work as the many other voices along the path of the two men’s journey towards understanding. The moment when the whole cast joins in song is divine.

Mark McEntyre’s elegant set design consists of two black platforms with steps either end and a gap in between so actors can move freely around the space. Five hanging strips of muslin, hand-pulled by the actors, provide a dynamic backdrop for Chris Bleackley’s visuals of helpful text and evocative photographs of hands. Natasha James’ lighting design, which makes excellent use of side light and colour, adds mystery and meaning to the play’s sense of place. Alongside Chris Ward’s atmospheric sound design, William Philipson’s original music complements with depth and rhythm.

Filled with existential questions and answers that leave much to ponder, this is ultimately a satisfying and superbly realised story of friendship between two men searching for God in a confounding world.

It’s hard to choose a favourite from three courses of sublime music. Often, it’s the entrée for me but the second course was my pick from this feast.

The entrée, Elfrida Andrée’s Andante Recitative for strings, was wonderful. A romantic violin solo, hesitant and broken over sustained lower strings, melody passing between cello and violins, a thick almost chewy sound, rising from the deep to finish on sustained violin. Delicious.

The second course was Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27. Pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason played with the perfect level of dominance in her right hand, her left almost unnoticeable at times but always guiding our ears towards the melody. She played with astonishing fluidity and an admirable confidence in the face of the complexity and challenge of a well-known Mozart concerto.

The last movement, Allegro, perfectly combined Mozart’s originality with Kanneh-Mason’s incredible talent. In lesser hands, Mozart’s harmonic variations might sound repetitive, but multiplied many times over by the factor of Kanneh-Mason’s talent, this was infinite variety and inventiveness condensed into a few too-short minutes. Kanneh-Mason made Mozart her own creation, surely one of the hardest things in the world. A divinely played version of I Say a Little Prayer was her equally impressive, wow-factor encore.

As far as the NZSO’s institutional memory and archives can tell, the orchestra has never performed Serenade No. 1 in D Major by Brahms. Six movements show off his versatility and creativity in what is considered his first published orchestral work. Conductor Tianyi Lu’s interpretation, coupled with the orchestra enjoying the challenge of something less familiar, established a lovely light-heartedness throughout this piece. From the opening few bars, it was clear something joyful was coming, followed by something martial, romantic, playful, and confident. The finishing Rondo felt like a cantering horse was slowing to a fast trot, skittering slightly and coming to a happy standstill.

NAZA is an Israeli military acronym for nezek agavi, a Hebrew term for ‘collateral damage’ that creates an unsettling moral detachment from the realities of mass civilian deaths in Gaza.

This chilling investigative documentary from Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor takes place under the cover of night on Tel Aviv rooftops where Abraham carries out clandestine conversations with 24 Israeli Defence Force soldiers and intelligence officers. Produced by The Guardian, the whistleblowers provide testimonies about the military operations in Gaza that have killed over 73,000 people, describing in detail the artificial intelligence tools and complex automated surveillance systems used by the IDF to target homes and buildings and knowingly calculate the number of NAZA that would die as a consequence.

The interviews plunge viewers into 77 minutes of darkness, with the silhouetted profiles of the interviewees set against the lit-up cityscape. This stripping of the senses centres the voices, which have been altered to protect identities. Every now and then a loud plane flies overhead or sirens go off alerting the city of a nearby strike. The documentary is interlaced with footage peering through the windows of apartment buildings where people live out their daily lives, sitting on the couch watching TV or standing in the kitchen cooking dinner. It shows an enormous skyrise building being constructed at pace – a stark contrast to the descriptions of the strategic flattening of entire suburbs and towns just 60 kilometres further down the coast.

Some interviewees draw rudimentary pictures of weapons-screen interfaces and describe the inaccuracies of the AI tools used. Another describes the surveillance of a child’s phone to gather intel on when her suspected father will be home and therefore when to strike. The documentary is impactful in its specificity. It doesn’t attempt to draw a bigger picture, and it reflects the unsettling ways the IDF personnel viewed themselves within the much larger and highly granular war apparatus. One of them describes his role as merely “technical”, another says, “if I didn’t do it, someone else would’ve”.

Never have I experienced such a weighted silence as the credits rolled. The must-see film received the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival. After its screen run, it will be available for free on The Guardian website in late November.

In Big Orb Improv, Caitlin Penhey, Criss Grueber, Ciarán Searle, Trubie-Dylan Smith, and Brendon Bennetts make up stories from audience suggestions, with just one hour to show the titular Big Orb the breadth of human experience. The show is fully booked and a few guests can only attend via standby tickets. A promising start!

The strategy is straightforward: the actors ask questions and use our answers as inspiration for their improv. Questions include the viewers’ biggest childhood dreams and fears, the recollection of a scary event, or the place where one feels most peaceful. The variety of answers leads to a hilarious mix of storylines: a serene surfing trip transforms into a woman (Penhey) getting stuck in her wetsuit while her would-be saviour (Bennetts) is eaten by a whale; meanwhile, a boy (Bennetts) trying to strike a deal with the devil (Searle) to bring back his deceased cat Misty ends up calling Baby Spice of the Spice Girls for guidance.

The more absurd the story gets, the better. It is amazing to witness the group’s ability to transform audience responses into comedic scenes, their success driven by the way they mine us for additional details to draw on. Especially satisfying is the way they bring each plot together at the end, never missing the perfect moment to drop an almost-forgotten reference from earlier on. Throughout, the Big Orb signals its pleasure or displeasure by changing colour. For example and much to our amusement, it glows green when asked whether underage drinking is acceptable.

A highlight is the seamless integration of the pianist Finn McKinlay and the lighting and sound technician Campbell Wright, who shape the plot in many unexpected ways. For instance, McKinlay may randomly change the music, forcing the actors to adapt accordingly, while Wright’s voice resounds as that of an incorporeal entity.

I would be interested to see what would happen if audiences were called upon later in each scene, especially to have a hand in the storyline’s twists and turns. But ultimately, these players from Christchurch’s Court Jesters interpret and integrate our responses in a way I’ve never seen before, resulting in a hilarious show. Go to Big Orb Improv to have a good laugh with friends and see great improvisors doing what they do best.

I’ve recently (accidentally) gone back-to-back with movies ranging from relentlessly bleak and cerebral to horrifically violent and morbid. Watching Calle Málaga, directed by Maryam Touzani, was a tonic for the soul.

Warm and uplifting, it takes place in Tangiers, following the cheeky, defiant, and resourceful widow María Ángeles-Muñoz (Carmen Maura) after her estranged daughter arrives at short notice to alert her that she is selling the apartment María has lived in for over 30 years, giving her the option to come back with her to Madrid or be shipped off to a nearby retirement facility.

Not wanting to leave the streets and community she knows and loves and the cemetery full of friends and family behind, María secretly moves back into her home while the sale is pending. She finds it emptied of all the things she’s collected over a lifetime, all of it sold to an antiques dealer. As she engages enterprising ways to buy back her belongings, her life takes on new colours.

While the script is deft and humorous, there are potent layers of silence too. The best friend and nun Josefa (María Alfonsa Rosso) is a favourite character. She meets María’s hilarious tales with telling facial expressions, while María’s silences in response to her daughter’s betrayal highlight the futility of words and the strength and dignity of remaining quiet.

A thematic undercurrent of fading empire adds its own accent to the film but never quite rears its head. The apartment, bought for a song, is furnished in old-world fashion, and María fondly recalls her days working in the Teatro Cervantes during the golden age of the Spanish protectorate. Her daughter exclaims that she is the last one of her friends to remain in Morocco, the rest having followed their children and grandchildren back to Spain. Yet it is María’s love of Tangiers that defines her, and the rich colours and textures of the ancient city – with its narrow, labyrinthine streets filled with sounds and smells and people – make it a character in its own right.

Other silences in the film were a source of frustration. Threads didn’t get pulled and questions went unanswered that had the potential to adjust the light cast on each character, especially regarding the daughter, who felt quite 2D. When the credits rolled, I felt slightly shortchanged. But then again, those gaps and silences leave space for the imagination.

Sir Donald Runnicles described the first piece in the programme, Der Rosenkavalier Suite by Richard Strauss, as “the Reader’s Digest version” of this four-hour opera. It certainly is a condensed narrative, capturing the core of the opera in five sections. Runnicles brought out the best in the orchestra, producing a beautiful big tone from the horns, wonderfully melded woodwind, and superbly expressive strings. Light and texture seemed to come through sparkling clashes of sound and delicately smooth, shining passages of melody, but then speed and energy brought us all racing downhill, breathless, at the end of the final waltz.

By contrast, Four Last Songs, also by Strauss, is an ode to mortality, acceptance of death after a long life well lived alongside one’s companion. Soprano Madeleine Pierard is so well suited to these songs. Her voice ebbed and flowed with power, intensity, sadness, and control. From poise and elegance in the first song Frühling (Spring), she perfectly conveyed the contemplation of death in September, and the slow sense of time and life passing in Beim Schlafengehen (When Going to Sleep) and Im Abendrot (At Dusk).

Runnicles mused on what would accompany Four Last Songs on the programme and told us Symphony No. 3 by Brahms was chosen because of their shared power and beauty; quiet and peaceful endings over a bittersweet shadow.

The second and third movements, Andante and Poco allegretto, captured this clearly. The relaxed and assured sound of woodwind in the Andante was a gentle folk dance hiding a sense of disquiet, carefully nurtured by Runnicles and excellently resolved by the musicians and the music at the end. The third movement, opened by a wonderful melody in the cellos, moved through tonal and major-minor shifts to lead into the fourth movement which delivered a sparkling peak, with suitably crisp sound from violins and cellos, before settling and reaching its tranquil end.

“Why do birds sit on power lines, but if I touched a power line I would be electrocuted?”

The show has not technically started yet, but Tom Knowles and Jeff Parsnips did say that they wanted us to ask questions. So, the young audience member who wants to know about power lines is just following instructions. Gamely, both of the titular dads stop the pre-show in its tracks to give him their full and immediate attention. Jeff works through an explanation about how electricity needs to be grounded before it can complete a circuit. Tom suggests it’s something to do with what bird feet are made of. 

“... Do you think birds’ feet are made out of rubber, Tom?” Jeff asks. 

“Probably.” Tom answers, with the kind of dead-pan earnestness that will be familiar to dad-havers everywhere.

It’s this combination of Tom and Jeff’s genuine engagement with kids’ curiosity, and a riotous side of Kiwi dad humour, that makes But Why, Dad? so very charming. Even more impressively, they mostly deliver the show through the medium of musical comedy. 

The story is loosely centred around a son asking his dad a series of difficult questions, which become prompts for comic songs. Together, Tom and Jeff tackle topics like overwhelming emotions, the power of asking ‘why’, and lesser-known words you could put in an alphabet song (B is for Barracuda!). It’s sweet, goofy, and heartfelt, with tonnes of laughs, loads of opportunities for the kids to join in, and plenty of humour for the parents too. 

The show does have a villain: an AI robot who offers to answer the child’s questions when dad starts to struggle. It speaks from its clinically smooth screen in a clinically smooth American accent, in stark contrast with dad’s stumbling Kiwi bloke mannerisms and mismatched socks. This topical conflict comes down to a delightfully silly resolution, which celebrates the many joys of ‘asking dad’ when you have a question.