Auckland Theatre Company have announced their 2017/2018 programme brimming with diverse productions that you can't miss, all presented in the company's recently open home, ASB Waterfront Theatre.
Family is at the heart of the terrific variety of this season’s plays. You’ll discover exploitative brothers, stoic mothers, stubbornly independent daughters, suspect wives, twins with magical powers, libidinous cousins, a tragically funny family unable to cope with change, a feisty matriarch determined to keep her family together and one terrifyingly powerful Big Brother.
Red Speedo
31 October - 15 November 2017
Thrilling, dark and dangerous, Red Speedo transforms one man’s near-naked ambition into a parable for a modern age obsessed with sex, sport and celebrity, where virtue has no value and the only crime is getting caught. Hailed as one of the brightest new voices of his generation, Lucas Hnath dissects the American Dream with a precision and passion not seen since David Mamet. Here, the desperate race for success is won by fractions of a second, and the clock is counting. Through an ever-spiralling series of reversals, betrayals, compromises and threats, tensions escalate to an explosive climax and blood-red confrontation with the truth.
ASB Season of Under the Mountain
7 – 21 February 2018
Enter a theatrical world of wonder, full of mystery, magic and master storytelling. Rachel and Theo are twins with red hair and psychic powers. These are soon enlisted by Jones, a wise alien out to save the universe from the Wilberforces, a race of giant creatures waking from a spellbound sleep beneath Auckland’s extinct volcanoes, whose sole goal is planetary destruction. Will Rachel and Theo learn to use their powers and overcome the pain it causes them before the Wilberforces wake up properly to destroy Auckland, and then the world?
Still Life with Chickens
17 – 24 March 2018
Mama’s proud of her flourishing veggie garden. So when she discovers a stray chicken enjoying her greens, her first instinct is to reach for the spade. But what starts as an all out war develops into a grudging friendship, as Mama opens up to the chicken about her struggles. Through this unlikely friendship, Mama learns there’s more to life than waiting for death. A beautiful, beguiling and very funny play about loneliness and the resilience of communities.
1984
9 – 25 March 2018
A radical, international award-winning theatrical adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, 1984, is on its way to shake and rattle Auckland. Set in a world where an invasive government keeps a malevolently watchful eye on its citizens, this arresting and much-lauded staging explores surveillance and identity and how Orwell’s fiction has become our reality.
Mrs Warren’s Profession
1 – 16 May 2018
Join Mrs Warren for a liberating evening of smart comedy, social commentary and sophisticated scandal. Mrs Warren’s clever young daughter Vivie discovers that her expensive education was funded by her mother’s earnings from a string of brothels, Vivie’s thoroughly modern worldview is thrown into tumult. Was her mother ever married? Who is her father? Could she be about to marry her own half-brother? With so many mysteries to solve and truths to tell, the two women sit down for a mother – daughter discussion neither will ever forget.
Kensington Swan season of The Cherry Orchard
12 – 26 June 2018
Bask in the timely and timeless brilliance of this immortal theatre classic by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. The Gayev family are sociable, intelligent, caring and hopelessly in debt. Unless they can find the funds, their huge estate, including its much-loved cherry orchard, will go to a mortgagee auction. The entrepreneurial son of their ex-farmhand offers them a solution, but they baulk at his proposal. Racked by indecision and unable to comprehend the huge social changes on the horizon, they spend one last summer on their beautiful country property, conjuring memories of the past to mask their fears of the future.
ASB season of Filthy Business
14 – 29 August 2018
East London, 1968. Yetta Solomon is the quintessential refugee who survived the un-survivable, then toiled in sweatshops to make her way in the world. Having built a mini-empire out of nothing, she takes no prisoners and suffers no fools. Now the formidable matriarch faces her toughest battle yet, as she presides over warring sons and a younger generation who can’t wait to move on. Determined to protect the legacy of her shop, how far will she go to keep the business in the family and the family in the business?
Giltrap Audi season of Rendered
18 September – 3 October 2018
In an unnamed Middle Eastern desert, Major Aria and her mercenary accomplice are on a secret mission to meet up with a New Zealander who’s defected to ISIS with his Arab wife. Meanwhile, at the Auckland Writer’s Festival, kindergarten teacher Miranda gets an offer she can’t refuse from a charming American visitor. Soon these six lives are inextricably entwined in a world-wide web of intrigue, danger and espionage.
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Last updated:
13 August 2018
