Sugar&Spice's The Atrocity at the Herald Theatre

By SUSAN BUDD

HERALD THEATRE, Auckland - Sugar&Spice's Atrocities was a hit last year at the Silo Theatre, although as Jason Hoyte points out in the programme notes for its most recent incarnation, over a three-week season it played to only 600 people.

Manic and irreverent, it surged and tumbled through hilarious comic sketches loosely held together by the rough semblance of a plot.

Highlights of The Atrocity are the best of those sketches: the courtship and domestic disintegration of a young couple; a sensitive, bisexual Australian guy testing the limits of mateship on a fishing trip; and a shocking gag going horribly wrong.

It has been expanded to almost two hours and has a starkly effective set designed by Sean Coyle of grim concrete blocks interspersed with video monitors.

DJ Timmy Schumacher has compiled a soundtrack that rocks, and Hoyte and Jonathan Brugh are immaculate in futuristic white prison gear.

But bigger is not necessarily better. The comedy no longer exists in tension with the Orwellian plot but is overwhelmed by it.

The play takes itself so seriously that the playful goading of sacred cows has slowed to ponderous posturing and, sadly, it is not funny.

Stuart Devenie's Big Brother is a powerful vocal presence, an invisible puppeteer whose task is to adjust the sensitive artists to the uncreative norm.

Curiously, this crushing representative of the establishment, with his delight in torture of the innocents, is the strongest character in the play.

I made a wish at the end of last year that Sugar&Spice would return, but forgot the advice to be careful in case your wish is granted.

The Atrocity shows the dangers of reworking - in fact overcooking - good, original material. It lacks the edge, speed and wild originality of Sugar&Spice at their inimitable best.