Perfomance: Barstools

Silo Theatre

Review: Susan Budd


Revolving round the lives of a group of Auckland bar patrons, Barstools, despite a writing credit for director Sebastian Hurrell, has the air of an improvised piece.

The dialogue is banal and repetitive as the cast struggle to find their characters, a fault exacerbated by a tendency to direct dialogue out into the audience rather than to each other.

The young and seemingly inexperienced cast are called upon to play older characters, a fact that only becomes apparent as the play progresses.

The audience is told, rather than shown, that the busker who horribly murders Amore and Danny Boy is an old man and that a youthful adulterous couple are, in fact, on the verge of middle age.

Even the blond, dreadlocked, didgeridoo-playing Jamaican taxi driver must, to judge by the families for whom he must provide, carry more years than his unlined face would indicate. And they are all two-dimensional and unbelievable.

A priest smokes dope while he pontificates on life, love and all that, while fending off the advances of an aggressively politically correct student with problems in geometrical perception, believing as she does that the pyramids are phallic in shape.

She acquires a Lothario so loathsome that his pick-up lines include the old film producer gambit.

The plot is inconsequential. In the first act the taxi driver picks up a few clients and in the second they all meet in the bar, flirt, argue and eventually go their separate ways.

They discuss politics, religion and sex on a level so naive it made me cringe.

The cast and their friends in the opening night audience appeared to be having a whale of a time, but this is one bar I cannot recommend.