Across the boards

I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the Auckland Theatre Company's first offering of the year, Eve Ensler's surprise hit, The Vagina Monologues.

Despite the ATC's star-studded cast, Lucy Lawless, Danielle Cormack and the marvellous Madeline Sami, the monologues remained, as they are on the page, more yawn than liberating theatrical experience. The Vagina Monologues lacked dramatic tension. It was no more than it promised: a series of monologues.

Despite Cormack's multiple on-stage orgasms, and the promised thrill of getting to sit in an audience and chant a rude word, despite the whimsy attached to such big questions such as "What would your vagina wear?" and "if your vagina could talk, what would it say?" it was a big, overhyped yawn. Talking vaginas? What a lot of noise about nothing.

This was the year ATC put on the big play about nothing: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

In ATC's 10th year, this Godot was a mature production, directed with flair and confidence by Colin McColl, who manipulated the strings of his performers - and his audience - with merciless glee. Raymond Hawthorne's Vladimir was a delight: a once-grand, now-shabby scolding duchess of the tramp world.

Tom Scott's first play, The Daylight Atheist, introduced audiences to a man destined to become a classic character of the New Zealand stage: the drunken, charismatic Danny Moffatt, a man based on Scott's father. A one-hander, Moffatt was played by that delightful actor, Stuart Devenie, with skill and compassion. The play was a little long, the set a little messy, but what remained in the memory was Devenie's performance.

The big hit of the year, The Rocky Horror Show - the season has been extended for the second time; the thing runs and runs - also had its imperfections. The sound was subterranean. And that is something of a problem for a musical.

But what a production. This Rocky Horror revelled in out-kitsching kitsch, in taking the mickey out of the big-bang musical. Joel Tobeck as Frank'n'Furter - he stepped into the role after the death of Kevin Smith - was an inspired piece of casting. His performance was sinewy and feline. He was gorgeous and sexy and wore his fishnets with an assured air that lifted him a platform boot heel above the rest of a very capable cast who helped end the 10th ATC year on a note of celebration.

- MICHELE HEWITSON

* * *

The year's major disappointment was Leah, a regendered version of the great Shakespearean tragedy which, despite the presence of some high-powered thespian and directing talent, never shook off the shackles of its concept, and cast new light only sputteringly.

The production's failure - the show closed early - resulted in the brief revival of an old standard: the suggestion that the critics, who slated the show, should take more seriously their duty to nurture the performing arts.

Other performances enchanted more. Wellington veteran Ray Henwood brought his one-man show about Richard Burton to town. Directed by Burton's great-nephew, he made stage magic, teasing a fully-rounded portrait out of a dense text and avoiding the obvious.

An energetic production of Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi, which reimagined Christ and the disciples as a band of gay men, was the target of bomb threats but went ahead anyway. It felt a little dated and some of the performances were plain clunky, but it had plenty to say to audiences in a world which still, apparently, wrestles with the idea that God might love all his children.

Paul Gittins directed experienced thespians Theresa Healey, Michael Lawrence and Jennifer Ward-Lealand in an icily convincing revival of Harold Pinter's Old Times.

The 31-year-old play's subtext - that the past is eternally contestable - made bracing viewing for audiences in the age of recovered memory (as well as a riposte to anyone who thinks Pinter is so last century) and the production was as classy as the play is classic.

Of local offerings, Stephen Sinclair's new play, The Bellbird - written in the early 90s and resurrected by the Auckland Theatre Company's enterprising 2econd Unit workshop - conjured a striking depiction of the uneasy relationship between Maori and Pakeha.

Danielle Cormack was pitch-perfect as a Pakeha servant who fell for a Maori man and ended up disowned by both cultures. Her measured and spare performance was haunting, never greedy for our empathy, and made up for some melodramatic moments in the production as a whole.

- PETER CALDER

* * *

SMALLER productions of extraordinary quality flourished in Auckland's secondary venues through the year, to the point that genuinely experimental works were found in such unlikely spaces as a back-street Ponsonby warehouse: Kim Renshaw's engaging production of Antimony.

This can only be good news for buffs: talent springing up everywhere like poppies, carrying fresh faces and new visions like nascent narcotics. Barely a week went by without something interesting to see.

2econd Unit began staging scripts in progress, including the intensely choreographed, mind-boggling Play 2.

SiLo enhanced its reputation for working the edge in a user-friendly way but much of what happened there transcended fringe. Exhale Productions' double-header, Pinter Squared (featuring a marvellous centrepiece performance by Nancy Shroeder in Alaska), Jackie van Beek's The Swimming Lessons, and Pip Hall's Red Fish, Blue Fish, with homage-worthy direction by Rebecca Hobbs, for example, were fully ready for mainstream audiences.

Maidment Studio spent most of the season lit and turned out one startling gem after another. Island Girls, from Oscar Kightley and Teuila Blakely, was a particularly memorable stunner, and William Walker's Take Me Home, Mr was star-flare brilliant.

It wasn't all back-room, of course, and there was no lack of spectacle to punctuate the season. High on the list of extravaganzas were Slava's Snowshow and Umoja, both at the Civic and worthy of the grand venue.

- FRANCIS TILL