KEY POINTS:
In a world of enforced consumerism, where government is by corporation, revolutionaries Loni and Randy are on the run from a city in a retro-futuristic world about to crumble.
Is it a plot from a 1950s melodrama, a 1960s/70s sci-fi flick, a dystopian novel or is it student politics 2007 style? You'd be on the money if you picked the latter. In the 1970s, campus activism was about megaphones and street protests; three decades later, Auckland University's student-led theatre company uses the stage to promote political and social debate.
Stage Two Productions, an Auckland University Students' Association affiliated club, has around 100 members and its productions - two each year - attract a mix of amateur and professional actors to auditions.
Caustic is its first show for this year. Part political satire, part social commentary, it's a biting and often humorous look at consumerism and corporations set in a 1950s-inspired future world.
Writer-director Thomas Sainsbury asked himself, "What fires me up?"
"Unfortunately, being so annoyingly unfazed by life, I didn't come up with much," he confesses. "Then I tried to think about times in my life when I was angriest. I suddenly remembered all the hideous jobs I'd had working for big corporations in which employees were considered units to squeeze the most productivity out of."
The more Sainsbury thought about it, the more fired up he became. He is so passionate about the subject, that he - and other members of Stage Two - fear they could be risking litigation because of references in the script.
It helps that Stage Two's co-president and Caustic producer is lawyer Yee Yang Lee - better known as "Square" - who believes student theatre should be political.
"We thought about it for a long time, and throughout we knew it would be easier to just give up and go with something safe," says Square.
"But theatre is not about being safe - it is about expression and artistic endeavours sometimes need to be intrepid. We honestly believe the ideas in this play need to be presented to the public, but that is never going to happen if we stifle ourselves from the get-go."
Sainsbury, who directed this year's Summer Shakespeare and whose one-man play Basement opens at the Dublin Cube Theatre later this year, says writing an earnest and solemn script was never part of the plan so it is shot through with black humour and tributes to the sci-fi genre.
Those extend to the music, made partly by a theremin played on stage by Jordan Bullivant. Invented by Russian scientist Leon Theremin in 1919, the theremin was one of the first electronic instruments and consists of two radio frequency oscillators and two antennae.
The thereminist moves his or her hands around the antennae to control the pitch and volume.
Its eerie moans have been used in the soundtracks of many sci-fi films and by musicians such as the Pixies, the Polyphonic Spree, Allison Goldfrapp and Radiohead.
On stage
What: Caustic
Where and when: Musgrove Studio, Maidment Theatre, Apr 27-May 5
