Edwin Wright delivers 'stunning' performance in Bruised

By SUSAN BUDD

SILO THEATRE, Auckland - It is 11.28 on a Friday night in Dunedin. A guy sits in a bar drinking water with ice and lemon. An Irish band plays. He listens to two girls talking dirty, but not to him. He is unbelievably stoned and his paranoia grows, fed by the psychotic barman and his water torture.

Edwin Wright gives a stunning performance. His resonant voice takes on girlish tones, a masculine Irish brogue and the threatening hiss of the barman with equal ease.

He moves with ease from the self-effacing shuffle of the student protagonist, to the barman's macho stance, to a girl's faintly flirtatious manner, showing immaculately controlled timing and penetrating insight.

Richard Huber's solo play is rich with poetic imagery and packed with sharply comic observations of character.

A girl "bruises" the floor with her laced, black boots. In the southern night, the moon sings and the stars are like insects. Huber deftly captures the conversation of two girls, as one sets out to shock with explicitly pornographic detail and the other responds in mock horror.

The protagonist's time-out in the loo is written with pathos and mordant humour, and has a surprise twist to its ending.

The same can be said for the entire play. Nothing is quite what it seems. The shift from observer to observed results in a total and often shocking shift in perception.

Although it is less than one hour long, Bruised is enormously entertaining and satisfying theatre.