Performance: Standouts from the small stage

By FRANCIS TILL

While most productions I saw this year featured outstanding contributions in one or more of the major elements - text, production or performance - one play truly stands out: Howie the Rookie, from Ireland's Mark O'Rowe.

Directed by Sydney Company B resident Chris Mead, Howie was a well-chosen starter for the SiLo's season. Both enigmatic and compelling, the two-hander spins a convoluted web of transfixing events ranging across most of Dublin's seamiest underbelly.

Scott Wills, as Rookie Lee, and Eryn Wilson, as Howie Lee, were absolutely mesmerising and in complete control through a production in which every single detail fell into perfect line.

Sarah Kane's Blasted also deserves high praise. This complex and frequently savaged work from the pen of a woman en route to suicide deals compellingly with many of sexuality's darkest aspects.

Josephine Davison as the quintessential victim, Cate, was riveting and presented herself in a lovely, heart-wrenching style that perfectly suited the inner messages of the play. Jeff Gane and Matt Sunderland were engaging and each handled the tortuous requirements of the piece with zest and finesse. Michael Lawrence's direction was probably crucial to the success of this piece, full as it is of wildly different characters on a course of fatal collisions.

The theatre of the fantastic was also well-represented this season by two strong works, The Young Baron and The Butcher's Daughter, both at the Herald Theatre.

Both were also deeply humorous, with wonderfully imagined sets and featuring commendable performances from all the key players.

Of particular note were Julie Nolan in Baron, for her portrayal of an engagingly demonic child, and that master of magical realism, Kate Parker, in Daughter, where she was, as always, almost supernaturally lithe and captivating.

Daughter was directed by Julie Nolan, which may account for some of the striking similarities the works displayed.

The accomplished Jon Brazier added to a long string of successes with his presentation of an unexpectedly refreshing vision of Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita (SiLo), as reprised by up-and-coming director Colin Mitchell.

To work, Lolita requires a Delores Haze, aka Lolita, capable of keeping the attention of audiences so fully engaged that the external content of the play, like the novel, unfolds almost in the background even though the narration is Humbert's.

Anna Hutchison provided that with an evanescent rendering of literature's most famous "victim" and uber-nymphet.

David Aston produced three very polished performances this season, two of which I was fortunate enough to see.

While he added much to the polemical Blue/Orange (Herald), his work as a lonely Waikato farmer in the utterly charming Where Are You My Only One? (SiLo) was not to be missed. Increasingly, Aston's name on a playbill means the work will be worth seeing.

On a comedy front, Island Girls: The Remix (Maidment Studio) will have gone a long way toward establishing Teuila Blakely as one of New Zealand's best young playwrights, and Naked Samoans Go Home (Herald) took the well-regarded, painlessly insightful series to an entirely new level, largely through Robbie Magasiva's handling of a darkly dramatic counter-story.

Like productions from the Island Players and the Naked Samoans, Mario Gaoa's wonderfully realised and tragic Two Days In Dream (Herald) may have been only a comedy in the telling, but it encapsulated a distinct storytelling tradition making itself known to, and gaining traction with, wider New Zealand audiences through these important works.

Closer to home, The Untold Tales of Maui (SiLo), from Wellington's Taki Rua house, featured Humourbeasts Taika Cohen and Jemaine Clement in possibly the most successful work of ironic irreverence I have ever seen, and takes the cap as funniest production of my year.