John Psathas’ Leviathan – Percussion Concerto is a work commissioned by the UN-backed Pastoral Project for Beethoven’s 250^th anniversary year. Psathas was required to reflect Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and promote action on climate change and the environment. The first movement portrays what Psathas called “the human race’s out of control race to disaster”, with the orchestra providing a broad ominous soundscape against which the percussion solo gives a sense of frenetic activity. In contrast, the second movement, which delicately integrates themes from Beethoven’s symphony, has a sense of eyes-wide-open wonder at peaceful nature. The mood was created through the orchestra’s strings and woodwind, the soloist’s use of glockenspiel and vibraphone, and the innovation of amplifying the sounds of water in a large bowl being slapped and poured by the percussionist. The third movement evoked pollution, recycling, and sustainability by the use of a plastic water bottle used as a rattle and a drum. The fourth movement focused on a more positive future: it had a feeling of purpose and resolve absent from the other movements.

We experienced a virtuosic and athletic tour de force from outstanding German soloist Alexej Gerassimez. This was an excellent performance from the conductor, orchestra, and soloist: a memory to be treasured.

The orchestra also played Wagner’s Lohengrin: Prelude to Act 1 and Schumann’s Symphony No 2. The Prelude is an uplifting piece of romantic writing, aethereal but noble. Schumann’s symphony is considerably darker reflecting his difficulties with mental illness. Just as Psathas’ work referenced Beethoven, Schumann’s symphony referenced his hero composer Bach and the so-called father of the symphony, Haydn. It is clear that Taddei loves Schumann. He gave a music lesson to the audience by having the orchestra illustrate aspects of the composition as he talked. Taddei has a wonderful rapport with his audience. We Wellingtonians are very lucky.

The atmosphere in the theatre is intoxicating as I take my seat for Gag Reflex, on as part of the TAHI New Zealand Festival of Solo Performance. Rachel Atlas takes centre stage, dressed to impress, and it’s absolute chaos from then on.

From New York to London, from pornography to family heartbreak, Atlas leads us on a wild ride through her life in any number of flabbergasting professions. She goes through more costume changes than I can count, all designed by Go Go Amy and all flawless. The scenography team of Bekky Boyce and Erika Takahashi have also done a fabulous job with a simple yet effective stage setting.

The piece was produced by George Fowler, and that unmistakable Hugo Grrrl vibe is everywhere. However, this is Atlas’ story, and she claims the space as her own. Every audience member is on the edge of their seat, uproarious in their applause and laughter. Atlas is a born performer and welcome addition to the Wellington theatre scene.

Intertwined into death-defying circus acts and astonishing tales of sex work is a heartfelt message. Powerfully feminist and unapologetically honest, Gag Reflex is a tale of empowerment and autonomy told by a woman who has lived an incredibly full life. Atlas takes her own scandalous exploits and turns them on their head, seizing worth and control from those who would withhold them.

The show is by no means perfect. A number of knives miss their mark (non-fatally) and an unfortunate audio cue mishap steals part of the monologue, but Atlas takes it all in her stride. I question the necessity of ‘The Hand’, but it seems to garner the audience's favour almost as much as The Gimp. I leave the performance energised, elated, and with a strange sense of conspiracy; as though I’ve learnt truths I wasn’t supposed to. Though certainly not for the faint of heart, Gag Reflex is an absolute triumph.

Upper Hutt in the 1980s is the newfound home of Cecily, a recent divorcee from a cheating husband in London and star of this joyous production in the TAHI New Zealand Festival of Solo Performance. Writer Bea Lee-Smith gives a powerhouse performance not only as the adorable Cecily but also as a host of other colourful characters that Cecily meets as she casts off on her own.

Arriving at local pub The Embers, where white wine from a box is the height of sophistication, Cecily meets an eclectic group of women intent on fulfilling their dreams. One wants to travel, another to publish a children’s book, and a third to open her own Italian restaurant. With their encouragement, Cecily joins a watercolour class to rekindle her childhood love of art and from there enters the bright and exciting world of style consultancy with Colour Me Beautiful.

Lee-Smith has performed Colour Me Cecily before and it shows. Constantly switching posture and accent with ease, Lee-Smith takes us on a journey of discovery while always letting us know where we are and who we’re with. Just a small table and its crocheted tablecloth, a chair, a handbag, and four coloured scarves representing the seasons keep her company. The rest is left to our imaginations.

This minimalism is an excellent choice as it allows Lee-Smith’s impressive performance skills to shine. With Hilary Norris’ careful direction and some choice snatches of 80s pop (Golden Brown and White Wedding included), the world of the Hutt in the decade that taste forgot is successfully conjured up, even for those who have never experienced the joy of snacking on Cheds and reduced cream and onion dip while sipping cask wine and ‘having your colours done’.

A delight from beginning to end, Colour Me Cecily is a warm, humorous, and touching tale of personal empowerment at a time when even educated women still had little to look forward to apart from wifely duties and motherhood.

Michael Metzger's award-winning PhD performance piece The Changing Shed deserves every iota of praise it has received thus far. Metzger is effortlessly hilarious and instantly relatable to all as he takes us through the trials and tribulations of a queer farmer's son.

From the moment we enter the space, I am entranced. Metzger limbers up as we take our seats then lays out the groundwork, both literally and metaphorically, setting down masking tape crosses to form a map of the Otago area. This wonderfully engrossing technique humanises our protagonist and grounds the story simultaneously. Before long, we are deep into marathon training and chicken raising, seeing both past and present alongside one another.

Metzger's magnetic stage presence and easy charm make him an absolute pleasure to watch. He cracks wise, treats us to a remarkably impressive flower arranging demonstration, and makes regular use of the on-stage treadmill. All the while, he paints a picture of his childhood, of all the things that push him to run. It is a marvellous performance that tugs on the heartstrings of the rightfully packed house.

My only complaint is that there wasn’t more. The piece felt like it was building to something that never quite came, a finale to round the performance out. With such a complex character portrayed by such a talented performer, I would have happily eaten up another 20 minutes of anecdotes and musings.

On as part of the TAHI New Zealand Festival of Solo Performance, the piece deals with a number of topical issues, primarily bullying and homophobia, and it does so with class and finesse every time. It manages to be hopeful without being preachy, condemning without being hateful. Even the references to assault are somehow tasteful. The Changing Shed takes a snapshot of 1970s Aotearoa and holds it up to the modern day. Some things are still awfully familiar, but the show offers a message of unity and growth. The last thing I would call it is ‘timid’.

Theatre veteran Steven Ray has chosen an extraordinary and challenging piece in Title and Deed to perform as part of the TAHI New Zealand Festival of Solo Performance. Although written in 2012, Will Eno’s meandering prose poem is remarkably pertinent to the existential crisis we’ve all been living through for the last two and a half years. The COVID pandemic has made many of us think at some point about the nature of life and death, and what it is to be human. That self-examination is captured beautifully and lyrically in Title and Deed, which is an ultimately uplifting ode to the weirdness of being us.

The skill in Eno’s writing is that it shows us ourselves from a highly quirky outside perspective, that of an unnamed traveller who has recently arrived here with nothing other than a white suit and a bag containing a long stick and an empty box. Is he an alien or is he human? Even by the end of his monologue, I’m not sure. But that doesn’t matter. He tells us plenty about the nature of his unspecified homeland. It is a place of perpetually rumbling blue skies, reverse weddings, and terrible Saturdays where the main exports are sarcasm and uric acid. Despite the traveller’s claim that it’s a weak and dying place, I still have an urge to go there.

Ray’s subtle and engaging performance, Jeff Kingsford-Brown’s unfussy direction, and Niamh Campbell-Ward’s soft lighting design let this strange text comfortably breathe. Thanks to the frequent non sequiturs, Ray occasionally calls “Where am I now?” to the lighting box while staying fully in character. This is a bold and wise choice to avoid the awkward pauses of an actor reaching for his lines in a first-time performance and keeps the quiet energy flowing.

The best theatre makes you think about it well after you’ve left the auditorium and that’s certainly the case with Title and Deed. Long may its blue skies rumble.

Loud, proud, and disavowed; Agents Provocateurs tells the story of half a dozen female spies throughout history, spanning some 400 years. Each tale of bravery and brutality is accompanied by a pop song parody, with snippets of Jo Marsh’s life threading a narrative together. Though this entire TAHI New Zealand Festival of Solo Performance piece is delivered with fierce enthusiasm, I am left feeling like we’ve barely scratched the surface.

The set design I applaud. The stage is set as an archive room out of time, with file boxes scattered everywhere and a sprout of cardboard tubes. Dynamic lighting takes us from scene to scene, from a melodramatic performance realm and back to Marsh’s direct address. These transitions are slick and effective, demonstrating the show's high production value. I’m only slightly perturbed by the sudden appearance of a pair of puppets, which are equal parts amusing and confusing.

The format is established as Marsh takes us through Mata Hari’s journey during WWI. We get the key points of each spy's life, but never much more than that. I feel we miss out on juicy details and the nuance and intrigue that are so inherent to the appeal of spy stories. The songs are fun, the rewriting clever in some places and verging on cringeworthy in others. I’m swept along by Marsh’s passion for her craft and her insatiable fervour as she regales us with each woman's life story.

Throughout the performance, the audience is bombarded with feminist and antifascist sentiments. Marsh reminds us that trans folk have existed for centuries, that women have been fighting out of the spotlight forever, that Nazis are… y’know, bad. While these are all obviously excellent messages, they’re nothing I don’t already know, and Marsh seems hesitant to delve deeper into her subject matter. These are powerful characters and I’d love to learn more about them. Next time I hope to see a more aggressive message from such an powerhouse performer.

What constitutes joy? That’s the question this production seeks to answer.

Conceived in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and commissioned expressly for the TAHI New Zealand Festival of Solo Performance, Joy is a set of five monologues and a sweet vignette written by female and non-binary artists Mel Dodge, Etta Bollinger, Indigo Paul, Elspeth Tilley, Nī Dekkers-Reihana, and Stevie Greeks.

As anyone with a shred of life experience knows, things that bring you joy come with an often-equal measure of pain and that is the great success of this new collection of work. Childbirth, a sibling’s wedding, or the rediscovery of single life after a relationship break-up can bring great joy, but they come hand in glove with fear, uncertainty, and self-doubt. As the programme deftly puts it, “joy is a shifting creature” and these writers have captured it with compassion and care.

The three performers, Nī Dekkers-Reihana, Mel Dodge, and Stevie Hancox-Monk, are confident and courageous in owning these stories. They make us laugh, bring a tear to our eyes, and create relatable characters from the excellent writing. Hancox-Monk’s perfectly delivered line, “You’re so nice it bothers me” is my favourite of the night.

The actors are supported by a beautifully simple set and lighting design (Bekky Boyce) that employs soft yellows, oranges, and beiges, with pops of pink to unite the monologues under a strong visual theme. Masterful directing by Sally Richards and Kerryn Palmer, well-balanced sound and music (Matt Parkinson) plus two square frames, an old chair, some textiles, and a handful of props give the actors a comfortable but flexible place to work in and some business to keep them moving. A computer screen with the title and author of each piece subtly lets us know where we are in the narrative.

Not only have this group of artists created a thoughtful and thought-provoking meditation on the theme of joy, but they have also created a joyful production that engages and enlightens while it entertains.

Part of the TAHI New Zealand Festival of Solo Performance, Back to Square One? is a reflective, personally engaging, and intimate view of the COVID-19 lockdown in April 2020 inspired by regular Skype conversations between the show’s creator and his 95-year-old grandmother Inga in Denmark. The drawings his daughter and her friend made on their shared driveway during this time were the source of the highly flexible format of the show that consists only of some sort of floor and a big box of coloured chalk, meaning it can be performed pretty much anywhere.

As the audience enters, we’re invited to pick a stick of chalk in our colour of choice and write our names along the edge of the ‘stage’, a simple dotted line. Falstie-Jensen then introduces himself and proceeds to sketch out Inga’s living room where she spent much of her lockdown watching Game of Thrones and Skyping her distant relatives.

By switching characters between himself and Inga with a subtle change of bodily posture, drawing on Inga’s bedtime stories of Danish mythology, and charmingly employing his box of chalk on the floor and walls of Circa Two, Falstie-Jensen weaves a beautiful tale of connectedness and renewal that overcomes the despair of isolation.

Falstie-Jensen also talks directly to the audience throughout and engages us in an exercise of shared connection and experience, so that when he finally poses the question of whether we have gone through all this pandemic-driven anxiety for nothing, we clearly understand the answer. The post-show offer of a delicious, buttery Danish cake and coffee is a lovely final touch.

So much discussion of the COVID-infested world focuses on the negative and it’s refreshing and uplifting to be offered a different way of thinking about what we’ve all seen and felt for the past two-and-a-bit years. Congratulations to The Rebel Alliance for taking the road less travelled.

The source of the contention that “Hell is other people”, No Exit is Jean-Paul Sartre at his bitingly existentialist best.

In Stagecraft Theatre’s impressive production, the three protagonists are as far from fire and brimstone as it’s possible to get in their poppy 1970s TV-show set (Amy Whiterod) with its amoeboid shapes, bright colours, and harsh lights (Devon Heaphy). With only three couches, an abstract bronze sculpture, a doorbell that doesn’t work, and an ominous knife on a shelf, this is a stunningly unbiblical place to spend eternity.

Pacifist journalist Joseph Garcin (Slaine McKenzie) is the first to be introduced to this garishly claustrophobic damnation by a jaded valet (a brief but excellent George Kenward Parker) who has seen it all many times before. Not far behind Garcin is Inez Serrano (Kate Morris), the only one of the three who knows she’s damned, and finally rich socialite Estelle Rigault (Karen Anslow). Their layers of apparent respectability are quickly peeled away as the truth is revealed about why each of them has been sent to The Bad Place. They come to the steady realisation that they are, in fact, each other’s torturers, destined to taunt and tease each other forevermore while those they left behind on Earth forget them.

McKenzie, Morris, and Anslow are equally strong and each inhabits their deeply flawed character with conviction and energy, never letting the pace drop or the latent brutality of these immortals lapse into sympathy. Joshua Hopton-Stewart’s slick direction keeps the movement flowing in the intimate acting area created by a well-chosen three-quarters seating layout that cleverly emphasises the discomfort of watching three people tear each other apart psychologically. The wardrobe (Helen Mackenzie) has a 1940s vibe, while also seeming appropriately modern.

This surprising production succeeds in making it easy to laugh at three vile bodies while having the uncomfortable feeling in the back of your mind that a special kind of Hell could be waiting for all of us.