By FRANCIS TILL
Season of One is three distinct bits of comic theatre, related only by being very strong solo performances.
Arohaotearoa is an extremely dry look under some damp Kiwi covers at issues, stories and characters from the barely beating heartland. Witty, droll, an elegant little suite in minor keys accompanied
by a slide show that Te Papa should acquire as a reflection of mid-century European Kiwiana.
Of particular note: the revisionist version of history in which Captain Cook receives a drubbing during an encounter with a triple-decker waka from which sharpened kumara are thrown, by Maori maidens, with deadly precision.
A shaggy dog story about a feckless newlywed ties the myriad events together and there's even a bit of gratuitous semi-nudity. It is performed by Kip Chapman, directed by Jennifer Ward-Lealand, and created by Chapman, James Milne and Paul Rothwell.
In Bruised, an almost balletically ballistic Edwin Wright uses a single stool as a reference point from which he populates an entire bar and its bathrooms with an astonishing array of characters. At the centre is an overly-stoned and exceptionally horny misfit, but there are women aplenty in the repertoire, most notably an Irish redhead dancing a jig who captures the protagonist's imagination so completely and in a series of scenes so evocatively worked, that Wright makes her real.
Written by Richard Huber, the text that informs Wright's brilliant physicality is evocative of Henry Miller: rich, full of poetry and vivid imagery, while being profoundly comic in the fullest sense. Lighting by Trygve Wakenshaw gets high marks.
Shane Bosher's A Star is Torn closes out the triad and works perfectly as pavlova. Bosher has been reprising this piece and under the direction of Oliver Driver seems to have found the sweet spot.
Here, it's a flawlessly hysterical bit of musical comedy in which Bosher dances, sings, mugs, costumes, parades and soliloquises his way through the story of a Wanganui boy who makes it, eventually, big in theatre.
There's a crispness in the story this time that has been lacking before as the cherubic Bosher takes everything, awesomely, over the top.
