High drama but low revs

Early in the year, Auckland Theatre Company producer Simon Prast was praying for a coalition collapse to coincide with a July performance of Julius Caesar.

The timing was slightly out.

But there was a mood about this year at the theatre that did reflect more sober, and unsteady, times.

If it was a year mostly lacking in an exuberant celebration of the truly new, much of what worked best was that which took a look backwards.

Reginald Rose's 12 Angry Men was set in 1954, first performed in 1958 and proved, at the Maidment Theatre in May, still to be thought-provoking, spell-binding theatre spun out of issues about justice and forgiveness.

Old-fashioned? Well, mostly in the best possible sense of the term: a script so lean the Two Fat Ladies would reject it as cholesterol watchers' cant. And true-to-period detail which enhanced the sense of unease about the fact that people are still put to death in the name of justice in that first world country, the United States of America.

At Sky City Theatre in July, director Raymond Hawthorne tore up the togas and put the cast of Julius Caesar on a stage that doubled as a cat-walk. Style was the downfall of this Caesar. It looked glorious - in the fashion of moody male models in glossy magazines - but proved to be a triumph of gloss over substance.

Up town at the reminiscent-of-a-student-flat Silo Theatre (is it part of Auckland City's Edge, or just off the edge?) the contrast between the Auckland Theatre Company's polished productions and the sometimes ragged fringes couldn't have been greater.

Always something of a lucky dip, you sometimes did get lucky. Hard-working young companies like the co-operatively run Unreal Theatre Company pulled an unlikely one out of the bag with its clever, precise production of Pinter's rather laboured Betrayal in March.

A quiet highlight, it does, though, say a lot about the theatrical year that, like 12 Angry Men, it was good - but not the stuff on which theatres are set alight.
- Michele Hewitson, senior writer