“Maman died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” Those are the famous establishing lines in Albert Camus’ 1947 absurdist fiction The Stranger. The novel follows Meursault, a detached, emotionally flat young pied-noir man in French Algeria, whose apparent indifference to the death of his mother becomes the central focus of a trial he is later put on after murdering an Arab man on the beach beneath a blazing noonday sun.

I’m always nervous to watch a screen adaptation of a film – I’ve been let down so many times. I loved the novel when I first read it. For months after I held a scalpel up to my thoughts and actions, never more acutely aware of the performative nature of being.

François Ozon’s 2025 adaptation blew my expectations out of the water. Black and white, set in 1930s Algiers with spectacular performances from Benjamin Voisin (playing Meursault) and Rebecca Marder (his girlfriend Marie Cardona), the film is aesthetically striking. The monochrome format emphasises light and shadow and each scenes composition, only adding to the psychological intensity. With Camus’ sparse and detached prose described as ‘l‘écriture blanche’, or ‘white writing’, and the central, repeated motif of a blinding and oppressively hot sun, it was immediately obvious that a film adaptation could never have been in a colour format.

The novel received criticism due to its upholding of colonial views of indigenous Algerians as second-class citizens and its antipathetic treatment of Arab characters. The film, on the other hand, cleverly sets the story against the backdrop of French colonialism, giving a contemporary perspective on race and empire, and in some ways, challenging the absurdist backbone of the original text.  

While the slow burn might be difficult for some to sit through, for me the pacing was fundamental to the atmosphere, enabling each scene to feel essential, layering one on top of the other and building to the crescendo of the trial and Meursault’s subsequent sentence. The novel is short yet dense, hailed as a foundational text on absurdism that requires multiple readings. I found that the movie only added new depths to my understanding of the philosophical theory. Watching the film and reading the book calls the viewer’s heart into question, which to me is always a sign of excellent art.

We don’t talk about money often enough in New Zealand. For something so critical and pervasive, conversations about money remain largely off-limits in polite company. Rightly or wrongly (usually wrongly), discussions are politicised rather than explored constructively.

It is refreshing to see Owe tackle this head on.

The script unfolds across 12 linked scenes, each carrying one character forward from the scene before. This structure allows the play to explore differing ideas of fairness around money through a series of interwoven, character-driven stories. The flexible set (Derrin Smith) and fluid staging enable swift transitions, maintaining the production’s pace, while the recurring characters create a strong sense of continuity. The result never feels episodic, a credit to Wright’s assured direction.

Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, Owe draws audience engagement through humour, encouraging reflection on what is usually the most awkward of conversations. At its core is the impact of economic insecurity on human relationships. Money becomes the language through which the characters measure love, obligation, fairness, generosity, and belonging. Even up-and-coming surgeon Steven (played by Austin Harrison) experiences his own form of economic insecurity in saving for a house purchase, echoing emotions experienced by Adria (Phoebe Caldeiro) as she is faced with an unexpected cost she cannot afford.

Serenity (Rachel McLean) and Andie (Ava O’Brien) are central in examining the tension between the transactional and emotional dimensions of relationships. Their assured performances stood out amongst a very strong ensemble cast, albeit aided by some of the most thought-provoking lines in the script. Andie in particular invites us to reflect on the duality within relationships: the transactions required to create order, separate from the underlying emotional connection that forms a deeper foundation. A relentless focus on the financials can suck the joy out of life, but enough ‘order’ is needed to create an accepted baseline. Owe recognises the truth in both positions.

There is much more to this show that I can cover here. I was left wanting more, not because the production was incomplete, but because it tackles discussions that are too often left unsaid. Squash Co. Arts Collective’s Owe plays at BATS until the 27^th of June. A must-see.

The black-box performance space at the new Toi Aro Arts Centre on Market Lane is an appropriately dark and claustrophobic space for staging Waenga, a large part of which is set in the cramped confines of a police station holding cell. Even before we go in, directors Jim Moriarty and Regan Taylor are barking orders at us to follow their instructions and move when told as the cast move in unison through the space.

Penned by Moriarty’s children, Hariata and Tamati, Waenga is a deeply relevant story of institutional racism against Māori performed by an energetic young cast through the lenses of satire and song. The talented Moriarty siblings also play the central characters of Connie and Grayson, two rangatahi who have very different ways of expressing their whakapapa and culture.

National Music School candidate Connie finds herself at the police station with a serious knock to the head after Pākehā crystal shop owners Gwendoline and Gavin (a hilarious pairing of Mycah Keall and Matiu Rata) object to her singing protest songs outside Uncle Rama’s shop. Idealistic Grayson is brought in as her duty lawyer to help her deal with the trumped-up charges. Meanwhile, her friend and social media influencer Peyton (a delightfully funny Brooke Wharehinga) learns the real meaning of Tangata Tiriti as she seeks to shine light on Connie’s unjust arrest.

The ensemble cast of nine expertly uses movement, dance, waiata, and a background of music beautifully provided by Rameka Tamaki on guitar to weave together this story with intelligence and wit. The belly laughs from the exaggerated Pākehā characters and the moments of wry humour offset the bleakness of Connie’s predicament and make her eventual fate more intensely emotional.

Importantly, the audience is invited for kai and kōrero with the cast and crew after the performance. There is much to ponder and unpick after 75 intense minutes, so the opportunity to do this communally is a welcome one.

St James Theatre feels bright and cheerful tonight, already shrugging off Wellington’s crisp winter chill as we prepare for a summer romp in an 18^th‑century country estate. Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro is an opera that never loses its ability to delight, packed with theatrical momentum and comic invention, yet finding moments to blossom into extraordinary beauty.

Conducted by James Judd, New Zealand Opera’s production celebrates the work’s subversive qualities, shifting attention even further away from aristocratic dominance and towards the servants and women who drive the action. Director Lindy Hume has achieved this in simple and highly effective ways. The ensemble of servants open the production, busy with tasks and bustling around the stage for the whole of the overture, and remain visible onstage throughout as they eavesdrop and gossip.

This evokes a household thinking and acting together, an effect supported by the set design (Tracy Grant Lord). Modular transparent panels, echoing palace walling, are reconfigured swiftly to suggest new spaces. They are used particularly well to allow concealed eavesdroppers to remain visible to the audience from all angles. However, the stark white surfaces set against a dark backdrop fail to evoke the sun-drenched summer day in which the action unfolds.

The principal cast work with notable generosity. Their responsiveness to one another gives the performance a sense of spontaneity and flow. Julien Van Mellaerts is wonderfully comic and expressive as the Count, capturing both the character’s arrogance and his underlying fragility with deft precision.

Felicity Tomkins is a standout as the Countess, her voice both powerful and gorgeously controlled. Every line is delivered with poise and emotional clarity, filling the space without ever losing intimacy. She’s also a comic powerhouse, especially in the scenes with Cecilia Zhang’s Cherubino, where she establishes an authentic, quietly charged connection that is both sensual and barely restrained. During the wedding scene she is entrancing as she dances a defiant pasodoble with Mellaerts.

Throughout, there is a palpable sense of shared momentum as the cast bring this intricate social world to life, ensuring the opera continues to feel vivid, generous, and completely entertaining.

This evening’s programme offers a carefully graded emotional journey, moving from introspective delicacy through virtuosic intensity to full‑blooded theatrical sweep. Under Benjamin Northey, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra navigates these shifts with clarity and purpose, allowing each work to establish its own atmosphere without losing an overarching sense of cohesion.

Kenneth Young’s Douce Tristesse opens the concert, unfolding in soft pulses and drifting lines, creating an impressionistic wash of sound that would not feel out of place underscoring a turn‑of‑the‑century period drama. The orchestration is luminous without ever becoming showy, and as the piece eases into silence, I hear murmurs ripple through the audience: “pretty, so pretty.”

Samuel Barber’s Cello Concerto provides a striking contrast. I didn’t know the piece or soloist Li‑Wei Qin prior to this performance but I fell hard for both and became enthralled within a few phrases. Barber’s language is at once muscular and tender. There’s a sense of forces in flux, repelling and aligning in turns as the music pitches through complexity and full‑bodied romanticism, and in rare, sublime passages emulsifies intellect and sensuality into delicious combinations. Qin plays with a masterful ease as the concerto’s taut rhythms and brooding intensity melt into more overtly lyrical, sweeping gestures and back again.

This intensity primes the ear beautifully for Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet selections. Heard in this context, the suite’s rich harmonic language and dramatic contrasts feel especially meaty. Northey brings an additional degree of confidence and fluency to the Prokofiev and draws out the pleasure and flavours in the music. The programme includes well-loved excerpts alongside less familiar material, opening on the rich, self-assured menace of the iconic Montagues and Capulets. Throughout, the string section carries much of the work’s emotional and rhythmic weight with impressive stamina, catching the bite and precision required. Meanwhile, the brass and percussion relish Prokofiev’s more dramatic edges, delivering passages of formidable power.

By the end of the evening, we are warm, nourished, and satisfied. This is a concert that understands how to sustain indulgence and interest, leaving the audience, quite simply, well fed.

It seems only fitting that Wellington Repertory Theatre’s centenary production (Mike Poulton’s stage adaptation of The Other Boleyn Girl) is royal, indulgent, and completely lavish.

On the night, the atmosphere is heady. There’s something period-accurate about the chaotic press of fellow theatregoers refusing to queue as we are swept towards our seats from the packed foyer of the Gryphon, but it’s once we’re inside the theatre that we’re really transported. Soft lute music plays, the smell of church incense burns, and the three leads (Ava Wiszniewska, Yasmine Alani, and Joseph Corbett as the Boleyn siblings) lounge onstage in silky undershirts and stockings, brushing each other’s hair. This is the first and last time you’ll see them enjoying each other’s company. Conniving, back-biting, sexual taboos, family dysfunction, and intimate personal betrayals rapidly ensue in this audacious historical melodrama set in the royal court of Henry VIII.

The production is extravagantly costumed by Anne De Geus in a wealth of colour and texture, with a little dash of humour. Highlights include the outrageous, hot-pink glitter explosion used to garb Anne Boleyn (in period-accurate silhouette, by the way), and pale, pouty goth Jane Seymour (Livi Dalley), whose skirts are adorned with black lace skulls. 

If you’re not familiar with the story, the script is bonkers (there are gasps and nervous giggles in the crowd as some of the more extreme beats play out), but it’s executed with verve by the cast. Alani is a bold and charismatic Anne, whose performance alternates between pride, vindictiveness, foot-stomping tantrums, and the occasional crackle of vulnerability. Wiszniewska plays the titular ‘other’ Boleyn sister with sensitivity and dignity, providing a grounded centre to the mad drama swirling around her. Meanwhile, the supporting cast populate the world with lovers, enemies, political rivals, and worst of all, family. The machinating Boleyn elders (played by Kevin Hastings, Catherine McMechan, and Mark Wilton) are a particular joy to watch. 

It’s a fun, ambitious, production and a rollicking good way to celebrate the centenary. Congratulations Wellington Repertory Theatre (and here’s to another hundred years)!

Jamie McCaskill wrote Not in Our Neighbourhood while working at Te Whāriki Manawāhine o Hauraki, the Hauraki Women’s Refuge. The play features five characters: documentary filmmaker Maisey Peters; Moira Makarere, who runs the Women’s Refuge Safehouse; and three of its current residents, Sasha Miller, Cat Rakiura, and Teresa Cummings. Drawn with permission from the experiences of wāhine living in the safehouse during McCaskill’s 18-month tenure, the three women – one fiery, one stoic, one reserved – could not be more different but have each survived domestic violence. In the play, they have agreed to feature in a documentary about Hauraki Women’s Refuge and are speaking with Maisey about their experience.

Bringing all five women to life with masterfully quick kick-ball-changes and heightened physicality is Hariata Moriarty. Moriarty’s performance style is elevated and theatrical, especially during moments of direct address. The gifted actor starts at 100 and doesn’t let up. Her energy is impressive, her passion palpable, her compassion and conviction clear. The whirlwind is breathtaking but dizzying. Due to the intimacy of Circa Two, and how close even the back row is to the stage, more moments of softness and stillness would serve to contrast against – and therefore amplify – the heavier scenes. I feel that dialling the delivery back in parts would allow the dialogue to breathe, thus giving vital messages more room to unfurl, to echo through the space, to impact. 

Vital it is. Not in Our Neighbourhood is deeply affecting, and everyone’s incredible mahi – from the wāhine and the refuge to the consultants, creatives, cast, and crew members who have brought it to the stage, both now and in the past – should be commended and celebrated. One particularly powerful scene sees Moriarty sensitively deliver Cat’s victim impact statement amidst a gorgeous and striking lighting state change from Emile Commarieu. This highlights one of the work’s central tenets: the way we stigmatise, blame, and shame the victims of family violence needs to change.

Presented by Taki Rua Productions, Not in Our Neighbourhood says it is in our neighbourhood. It is in our community. But there is help, and with that comes hope.

I’m hectic by the time I arrive in the foyer of The Hannah for James Mustapic’s newest solo show. I’ve been battling the bus timetable, one of my jobs has just imploded, my date cancelled last minute, and I’ve got a little smear of hoisin sauce on my shirt, which I’ve spilled out of a bao bun over dinner. So, I am primed and ready to experience James Mustapic.

Because, as it turns out, James Mustapic has been having a hard time too. The full story unfolds over the course of the hour in a gloriously labyrinthine, multimedia yarn of new boyfriends, poorly received Seven Sharp segments, driving lessons, chlamydia, deranged flatmates who may or may not be on meth, exorcisms both metaphorical and literal, and a plethora of other failures and vulnerabilities, including his own mum showing up late to the show. “Janet?” he asks the packed theatre, hopefully. No answer.

The show is extremely personable, and desperately relatable throughout. I was invested in every trainwreck flatmate who moved in, and felt gleefully malicious towards every commenter on Mustapic’s Facebook post. I laughed maniacally all through his opener, which was essentially a PowerPoint presentation about being unpopular with old people on the internet. And when Janet finally joined us, 20 minutes in, we all went wild.

James Mustapic Yourself Up And Get Back On That Saddle Girlfriend is a show that’s fundamentally about trying, and failing. Correspondingly, the tone is casual, haphazard, and genuinely intimate. Mustapic leaps between bits, occasionally stopping to show you a captioned text message or a funny video, and it’s all a little like listening to your very funniest friend telling an anecdote. Although Mustapic is, I think, a deceptively organised storyteller. Structurally, the wandering anecdotes always come back around, building surprising connections and landing increasingly esoteric punchlines. “And that’s what air fryers have to do with being gay.” Mustapic says triumphantly at the show’s conclusion. By the time you get there, it all makes perfect sense.

GRAMMY^®-winning Australian guitarist Tommy Emmanuel is touring his 2025 album Living in the Light. Such is the quality of his musicianship that five of the 11 tracks were recorded in one take, then finished and mixed in one day. 

The vibrancy of Black and White To Colour made it the perfect track to start. After Young Travelers and A Drowning Heart, also off this new album, Tommy said “No list here, I’m making it up as I go along”. Guitar Rag followed, then segued into Nine Pound Hammer with Tommy saying “Take it boys” then proceeding to make a percussive, washboard sound by scratching his pick on his guitar while playing a rolling bass, accompanied by his deep, rough-edged vocals. Amazing. 

He preceded Endless Road with an explanation of a period in his life, when deep in pain and grief, his music kept him going. The Sharon O’Neill classic Maxine followed, with Tommy’s vocals evoking the sadness of the lyrics. On The Beatles’ Michelle, the harpsichord-like harmonics were breathtakingly beautiful.

The vocal intro for Angelina, written for his daughter, was an added treat, as the original album track was instrumental only. Nat King Cole’s Mona Lisa, in the jazz idiom and a favourite of Tommy’s, was gorgeous. On Mombasa, that he wrote in Africa, he hit a light brush on his microphone while using his guitar to create complex percussive African rhythms. This jaw-dropping, almost indescribable technique left him breathless. Auckland singer Phil Madsen took up Tommy’s challenge to sing John Farnham’s divine Burn for You. Voice and guitar were superlative. Tommy then quipped “Here’s a celebration of a band I was once in”, launching into a blistering version of Dragon’s April Sun in Cuba, with the crowd joining in raucously.

Tommy welcomed back to the stage the superb support act, English finger style guitar player Mike Dawes, for Sting’s Fields of Gold and Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. For John Mayer’s Slow Dancing in a Burning Room, Tommy said “we’re going to play a song to take you out tonight which will just leave us all in a good vibe, man. Just enough room for some hokey pokey ice-cream, oh yeah... my drug of choice!” A good vibe indeed had by all.