[What’s Your Bus Number?]
Absurd, playful, and freshly imagined. Co Theatre Bodily have as soon as once more produced an comedic and engrossing piece. Mixing bodily theatre, up to date transport woes, dwell music, and light-weight viewers interplay, Wheel Head, written by Beth Kayes in collaboration with Katie Burson, is a shocking and charming 50 minutes.
We’re launched to Joanna (Katie Burson), Aucklander and Birder extraordinaire, who finds one morning her automobile has been stolen and dumped some 4 kilometres away from her dwelling. How will she get to work on this tremendous metropolis that’s Tāmaki Makaurau ? Cue catastrophe after ill-fated catastrophe as she tries to navigate the opposite supposedly viable technique of transporting oneself about our metropolis (strolling, biking, public transport).
The work is temporally sure to a day in Joanna’s life and her world is replete with acquainted feeling characters– her impatient and detached boss (Beth Kayes), the man Chook fanatic and rabid environmentalist ‘French Greenie’ (Lucas Haugh), a bumbling, tennis taking part in, mayor (Beth Kayes) –in addition to some much less acquainted characters together with a slinky Wheel Head fighting empathy on the job (Beth Kayes) and Tūī an anthropomorphic chicken girl with children to lift and rats to battle (Irasa Si’ave).
Si’ave’s Tūī is a revelation. With Si’ave’s in depth Commedia dell’Arte coaching it’s little surprise that this Tūī is so completely pitched and the physicality is so gratifyingly truthful. It is a character that should seem on our phases once more and will effectively turn into a inventory character in her personal proper.
On prime of the varied hilarious techniques of motion totally different characters take, the jokes are so recent that there a way that this piece has organically sprung up on account of all of the current rain and that it’s the power of the performers that give the work the polished execution that might normally belie a brief improvement interval.
The work is strongest when Lucas Haugh’s musical accompaniment lends the motion punchy rhythms or the blaring of a horn. Including to the world created by the paraphernalia of biking and a few playful exaggeration of the dimensions of props, Michael Goodwin’s lighting design efficiently shapes the expansive of Q’s Loft stage into separate areas and creates the feeling of the totally different liminal areas Joanna inhabits throughout her day of journey. A very satisfying impact forged a design throughout the stage which mimicked each the shadow of overlapping tree branches and that forged by mild shining by means of the spokes of a bicycle wheel.
As Bar-Tailed Godwits, deconstructed bicycles, and orange highway cones swirl in regards to the stage, jokes are nimbly laid all the way down to resurface later to renewed laughter. Wheel Head finally arrives at a satisfying and round conclusion regardless of the numerous shifting elements and the brief runtime. Even making an attempt to recount the occasions of Wheel Head leads to laughter. This pleasant present was to not be missed.
Wheel Head performs the Loft at Q Theatre 22nd – 25th of February 2023.
