Review: Young & Hungry Festival at Basement Theatre

L-R: Robyn Paterson, Aimee Simpson, Harriet Urlich, Geraldine Jaynes and Sophia Scragg in Sit On It. Photo / Brett Phibbs

The Young & Hungry Festival is a well-established Wellington institution committed to giving young people a taste of professional live theatre and this year Aucklanders are invited to join the feast. The bill of fare, served up in partnership with Auckland Theatre Company, offers three one-hour plays.

First up is Oyster, with the subtle, elusive flavours of Vivienne Plumb's stylish and poetic writing. The play creates an atomised, free-floating space in which fragments of everyday life are given a strange luminosity.

Green politics, vegetarianism, a treatise on visions and Star Trek trivia are mixed with high school bullying, teenage pregnancy and evangelical Christianity. The juxtapositions successfully evoke the randomness of a hyper-connected world and the play reaches a suitably bizarre climax with an impromptu symposium on the meaning of apocalypse.

The non-naturalistic dialogue is well handled by a large cast. Lorena Toevai gives a particularly engaging performance with a disarmingly sincere account of her character's religious convictions.

The second presentation is Sit On It by Georgina Titheridge, which offers a nightmarish answer to why women spend so much time in the toilet.

The play encloses us in a seedy nightclub restroom which, rather than providing a haven for its teenage revellers, seems like one of the inner circles of hell where the torments of the outer world are condensed and intensified.

An endless parade of young women - along with a couple of confused men - move in and out of this claustrophobic space in various stages of intoxication and neurosis.

The experience - with constant reference to all kinds of bodily fluids and raunchy trash-talk - is not for the fainthearted. But the play has the irresistible fascination of a downmarket reality TV show and the hilarious dialogue is arrestingly real - suggesting hours of patient and meticulous research.

Urban Hymns, by Miria George, jolts us into a very different vibe with a moving account of the anxieties of a teenage school-boy who has been laid-off from the part-time job that provides desperately needed income for the household bills.

A powerful performance by Nathan Wharerau brings home the grim realities of the economic recession and the highly energised cast presents a revealing glimpse into the world of Maori and Pacific Island youth culture.The play boldly engages with poetry of Hone Tuwhare.