Review: Short+Sweet at Herald Theatre

Floor Thirteen, written and directed by Thomas Sainsbury, is one of the 40 short plays in the annual competition hoping to win a place in gala finale.

Bright young things have produced numerous short films in this country, but short plays? Not quite so many. Happily, this may all be changing: enter stage west, from Australia, the world's largest festival of 10-minute theatre pieces.

Reminiscent of the 48-hour film festival (but without the two-day production time limit), Short+Sweet is an annual competition which, this year, features 40 plays over two weeks, in four seasons of 10 plays each. The 10 plays voted the best overall will make up the gala finale on January 31.

This is a good, groundfloor way for theatre-types to get experience and get noticed without the heavier financial headaches of producing full-length plays.

The staging is necessarily simple; it's all about the performers and their words, rather than whiz-bang effects.

While the short format offers a plum opportunity to experiment, this week's season is mostly well-presented sketches and skits; playwrights are perhaps coming to grips with what's possible in a few minutes.

One notable exception is the well-structured, poetic miniature-with-depth, The Mooncake and the Kumara, truncated from its Asian Tales outing last year.

The Outfit Theatre Company's diverting piece on phone calls, Tone ... , is slight but slick. Borys the Rottweiler, a monologue delivered by the title character, burns slowly to a compelling climax. The Fruits of War portrays an escalating, attention-seeking spat with funny, messy literal-mindedness (plastic sheeting is provided to the front row audience to "avoid collateral damage"). In Exit Stage, Renee Liang gives an amusing backstage slice-of-life a la Noises Off.

The acting is surprisingly polished. In particular, Chelsea McEwan Millar shows poise and precision in the glamorous 10,000 Cigarettes; Gary Young believably embodies the lonely immigrant in The Mooncake and the Kumara; Nic Sampson plays up the comedy in Thomas Sainsbury's schoolboy-joke Floor Thirteen; and Chloe Lewer is a lightning-quick chameleon as one of the disturbed Wild Things.

Seats are around $25, so the plays are a bargain at $2.50 each. Short+Sweet's debut entrance on the Auckland scene is welcome.