James Griffin: The art of forward thinking

It's half-time, or thereabouts, for the Auckland Festival 2009 and what a dazzling array of artsy treats we're seeing here in the city Wellingtonians love to look down their noses at. Who says we suck at culture now, eh?

Once we get our transport infrastructure and inner-city architecture sorted out they'll have nothing left to sneer at.

So successful have been many of the shows we've seen so far, and so highly anticipated are some of the shows to come, that there are already whispers in the deepest, darkest recesses of the festival bar about possible sequels in 2011.

Okay, yes, often it is just me doing the whispering but it keeps me amused and that is what is important here. One of the sequels I'm really looking forward to in my head is Red Leap Theatre's Okay, Now What?, the sequel to The Arrival.

Whereas The Arrival is all about a bloke leaving his family behind and travelling to a land where the future is unknown, Okay, Now What? is all about what happens after he's been there for a while and he's realised the place isn't as flash as he thought it might be. Then his wife and family turn up and start nagging him about how it isn't the land of milk and honey he reckoned it would be when he buggered off and left them all those months ago.

Plus, she's very suspicious that he hasn't exactly been behaving himself while he's been carving out a new life for them all (or, at least, that's what he says he's been doing, not that she can see much sign of it).

Luckily some cute cardboard animals and some puppets charm her and the kids and there is a happy ending. The sequel to The Andersen Project, Robert Lepage's theatrical masterpiece inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's timeless fables, is The Ludlum Project, based on the timeless spy thriller novels of Robert Ludlum.

It shares many of the same thematic issues as The Andersen Project - the confrontation of romanticism and modernism, questions about sexual identity, unfulfilled fantasies and a thirst for recognition - but it has heaps more violence and chasing.

Apparently the sound design in The Ludlum Project, with the breaking of bones and crunching of cartilage is worth the price of admission alone. A sort of prequel I'm especially hanging in there for is Anticipation, which takes place (obviously) before Nostalgia, the work by Japanese theatre company Ishinha that revolves around the experiences of Japanese immigrants to South America.

Anticipation will be a work commissioned especially for New Zealand and it will deal with the experience of eating fish and chips and how the anticipation of the eating gives way to eventual queasiness and an overwhelming feeling of "what was I thinking?"

The cycle is completed when, within a matter of days, the experience of eating fish and chips is viewed with nostalgia and the anticipation of Anticipation begins all over again. One sequel I'm in two minds about is the Auckland Theatre Company's sequel to The Wife Who Spoke Japanese in Her Sleep, called The Husband Who Snored A Lot. This purports to tell the same story, only from the other side of the bed, as it were.

I worry, however, that it will be less magic realism and more an opportunity to sneak in cheap anti-male fart gags among the snoring. Possibly more my cup of green tea will be Front Story, the Ensemble Project's sequel to Back Story, which is told in the now but deliberately makes no sense in that it is told backwards.

Challenging stuff. Eugene Ionesco's The Chairs, presented at the Auckland Festival 2009 in French, is a play that has been crying out for a sequel for a long time.

The Tables, which will be presented in 2011 in Swahili, takes the absurdity of The Chairs to new levels by adding sturdier legs and putting a flat surface on top.

In it, a man and a woman lay a table with things that aren't there, for a dinner that will never be eaten because it doesn't exist and never will because no one is coming because they don't exist and never have. All in a language no one will understand. Genius. So all in all, some very tantalising prospects on offer for some mythical Auckland Festival of the future.

Sure, the possibility of some, if not all, of these productions ever happening is, at best, phenomenally unlikely, but a man can live in hope as he mutters to himself down the back of the festival bar. But, until the day my dreams come true, I'll just have to carry on with the stuff that is on offer here, today, in the real world.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.