Performance: sad ape

St David's Church Hall

Review: Bernadette Rae

One of the actors in this first outing of Ax(with) Group, who define themselves as "Auckland's latest innovative devising and physical theatre group," walks around with a little stuffed monkey on her shoulder.

The group claim visual metaphor as one of their strong creative points.

A wife bundled up in a big tube of cheesecloth, like an oversized Christmas ham, is another image with a grisly impact.

The same wife later takes to her bath and taunts the audience with her despair by toying with a glowing electric heater from within her suicidal suds.

And the term physical theatre takes on new meaning when the audience is shepherded about the quirky performance space offered by St David's.

But these flashes of dramatic inspiration arise from a background of far less cohesive - in fact, frequently mystifying - movement and a muddled sort of action which makes this sad ape an interesting, but far from perfect creature.

Kate Bartlett, Micheal Dwyer and Tessa Mitchell are between them a man and a woman, with a lot of human baggage and a world-weary relationship. He has fought in the Korean war, she has had an abortion. He is a butcher, who stands on his hands to give his customers perfect service. She does voluntary work in the children's ward of the local hospital. She could never have children of her own afterwards, you see.

The second woman is a puzzling figure, a sort of free radical who attaches herself to the action, sometimes causes it, and at the end delivers a parable that is maybe meant to make sense of it all.

But it doesn't. Mainly because sad ape tackles too much, "an investigation of life in all its infinite variety" no less.

You could call that hopeless pretension but youthful over-optimistic enthusiasm is a kinder reading. And you do get swept along in it all, even if a tad reluctantly.