Rocking, shocking and spectacular on stage

FRANCIS TILL reviews the year in theatre, a diverse and at times controversial 12 months with some pleasant surprises.

From spectacle to solo performance, Auckland theatre in 2001 has been one of the most diverse yet.

Since the beginning of the year with the Auckland Theatre Company's controversial Haruru Mai, from the pen of Briar Grace-Smith, more than 30 challenging productions have been staged in five major city venues. We've seen a highly regarded presentation of Bruce Mason's solo masterwork The End of the Golden Weather, at the Bruce Mason Centre in Takapuna. And there has been a host of encouraging productions at smaller theatres in and around the city.

There has been something for everyone - and a lot of it.

Many well-known faces fronted up on the boards, often in roles that stretched them to previously unsuspected dimensions, but the year was also marked by the appearance of new talent, often in smaller works at the quintessentially off-CBD Silo Theatre.

Two Roger Hall plays claimed sell-out audiences and riled the critics at the same time. A Way of Life incensed some reviewers, but the play packed the Sky City Theatre with audiences looking exactly for what the critics were objecting to: a New Zealand historic saga both well understood and loved. Hall's new Take A Chance On Me upset some reviewers who found its charm a bit thin, but Roger Hall plays tend to be critic-proof when it comes to box office sales and this was no exception. The play is making a return appearance next season when the ATC revisits it "by popular demand" in March at the Bruce Mason Centre.

Toa Fraser staged two introspective winners at the Maidment, both starring the mercurial Madeleine Sami, an actor capable of spawning two dozen fully formed characters in two hours, unassisted. Bare, in which she did just that, was a return engagement (from its 1998 debut) after the play had toured extensively, winning honours in Australia (Sydney Morning Herald's Critic's Pick last year) and the Edinburgh Fringe in 1999. In Fraser's Number 2, Sami took a rest from Bare's 23 characters by giving audiences a mere nine characters over three generations.

More highly charged Pacific Island themes found their way into the Herald Theatre with Oscar Kightley's Naked Samoans and Albert Belz's Te Maunga, both plays that could not have been written anywhere but Aotearoa.

The Silo continued its exceptional series of small, experimental plays and often transcended its "fringe" reputation in all but architecture and minor production peripherals. Some, like the luscious and complex Sister WonderWoman with Josie Ryan - could easily have filled the Maidment. Other pieces, like the four-part Shakespeare's Shorts and James McLure's Laundry and Bourbon, showcased exceptional emerging talents in works that belonged exactly where they were performed.

Danielle Cormack absolutely wiped the floor in the ATC's The Blue Room and A Streetcar Named Desire - playing against Kevin Smith in both.

Oliver Driver stood out again and again, but nowhere more decisively than as Guildenstern against Craig Parker's diminutive Rosencrantz in Tom Stoppard's highly regarded Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by the ATC.

But there were some surprises.

A walk-in - David Ashton - took the pivotal role of Heisenberg in the intellectual sleeper of all time, Michael Frayn's Copenhagen. That was the first surprise. This brilliant play pushed its cast and everyone else involved into that highest of art forms: thought. One critic wrote that it made its audiences feel intelligent. It did that, and more. This might have been the best play of the year - because everything about it, absolutely everything, was perfect.

And then there was Elizabeth Coleman's Secret Bridesmaids' Business, which received mixed reviews by critics concerned with too much froth on the cappuccino, even though it has been a sellout here and in Australia. But no one had a bad word to say about Rebecca Hobbs, who was glorious as the voice of truth in a play about the secret inner core of weddings and some transcendent Aboriginal rites.

And if Katy Parker, who did a stunning 20-minute version of the life, spirit and death of Lady Macbeth at the Silo in Shakespeare's Shorts doesn't win something major soon, the voting is rigged.

Marcel Marceau turned up at the end of the year for a group of shows at the Civic, and lived up to his reputation, giving the revitalised show palace a taste of its own history with his Chaplinesque moves and poses worthy of Antonin Artaud. There was poetry in seeing The Original in Auckland's original.

At the other end of the scale, Chicago, among the most ambitious productions to hit Auckland, rocked and shocked on the sheer power of, well, what the genre is all about: great voices, long legs and never a moment to catch your breath. All at the Civic in October, the only venue that could do it justice.

Hair, on the other hand, just rocked. This ATC performance at Sky City received some reviews which called it an "anti-war" play. It was that but, more importantly, it was a play that celebrated a controversial style of life to an audience eager to understand it. It not only mirrored the drop-out America of the time (the 60s), it was an advertisement for it. The ATC production, despite being overrun by events in Afghanistan, succeeded, for the most part, in keeping the focus where it was in the original: on fun.