Blithe Spirit

Noel Coward was a charmer

As a writer he was Brahma

Velvet jackets and pyjamas

“The Gay Divorce” and other dramas

Yes, Noel Coward comes to Circa! This time in the form of Blithe Spirit. Normally, we’d go when Nicola was on ushering duty, but for reasons she wasn’t able to take her allocated shift, so we had to *gasp!* buy two tickets to the show.

As always, dinner first. Circa Theatre have opened their new restaurant Chouchou, but so far it’s only serving…breakfast. Lunch and dinner are “coming soon”. Instead, we decided to give Wellington’s newest venture, A High Dining, a go. This is sited in the former Apaché space – Apaché have now moved to Tory Street.

A High Dining promises much, but unfortunately just misses the mark. We started with cocktails: Nicola had an Elderflower Rose French, and I asked for a Negroni. I say “asked for” because two minutes later, the waiter returned and, regrettably, they cannot make a Negroni. “No matter” I replied, “I’ll have a Martini instead”. Guess what? This time it was the barman who came to explain, regrettably, they had no vermouth. I had a gin & tonic. The barman, I hope, will be off shopping for these bar basics tomorrow.

We started with venison carpaccio and salmon tataki, both of which were good. For mains, we had the tagorashi fish and prawn dumpling and duck leg. The fish turned out to be a fish fillet with a prawn dumpling accompanying it, which wasn’t quite what was expected…a slightly better wording on the menu would avoid any ambiguity here. The duck leg was a bit on the tough side. Cooking medium-rare is fine for duck breast, but not so successful on leg meat. There was an overabundance of different vegetables served with it – beetroot, green (sic), chewy (sic) red cabbage, Moroccan brassica, cherries, buckwheat. Less is more, folks! I didn’t think it quite worked. We stuck around for puddings as well, having the chocolate caramel delice and the apple and almond pudding. Both good. It’s the mains that need a bit of work, I reckon. I was a bit disappointed, especially as they’re charging Logan Brown prices for distinctly sub-Logan Brown food.

We were in plenty of time to take our seats in the theatre, up high in the penultimate row as I’d only booked the tickets a couple of days before, and this is a popular show. A lot of the audience looked like they might have seen the original West End production, but I guess that’s just the demographic that keeps Circa Theatre going.

Circa stalwart Simon Leary led as Rudi, and Ginette McDonald as Madame Arcati, the medium. I’m sure we’ve also seen a lot of the other cast in various productions over the years. The story (spoilers!) involves Charles, an author, inviting a medium round for dinner as a laugh, and ostensibly to gather information for a forthcoming novel; only to be horrified when the ghost of Elvira (Laura Hill), his dead first wife, contacts Charles…and only Charles. The others can’t hear, or later, see, the ghost, but Charles can. They can, however, see her manifestations, when she moves items around, but they think it’s just Charles trying to fool them. In keeping with modern times, Charles is now living with Rudi rather than the original second wife, Ruth.

It’s all jolly good fun and you should go and see it if you can.

Fringe Frolics

It’s New Zealand Fringe Festival time again, and for the third year I’ve volunteered to help out. Nicola is no longer volunteering as she is now an active participant, with her band.

This year, I have been rostered exclusively at Hannah Playhouse, one of the larger venues for the Fringe, and therefore inclined to have events that will attract a bigger audience; so not so much the weird, quirky shows that are the essence of the festival. Next year I’ll ask if I can get a mix of venues so that I can see some of the odder offerings.

The first show I saw was Nicola’s band, Sven Olsen’s Brutal Canadian Love Saga, or The Svens as they are more commonly called. They were again playing at Newtown Community Centre. I say “Nicola’s band” but she is a viola player in the string section, so perhaps she’s not the actual leader of the pack. They played their usual selection of songs about life in Wellington and New Zealand, with backdrops that are an integral part of the show. 

My first gig at Hannah Playhouse was Antonio!, billed as “a queer punk pirate musical starring Shakespeare’s ultimate love interest”, a reference to the fact that Shakespeare has a character of this name in four plays. This is a romp through those works, with the conceit that they are in fact the same person, and Shakespeare was in love with him.

The following week was a sell-out performance of The Spinoff: The Fold Live, New Zealand’s biggest (only?) media podcast, broadcast live from the theatre with two guests, also from NZ media. How interested am I in the behind-the-scenes goings-on in New Zealand’s media world? Not very. I was allocated the mezzanine and balcony section for this show, which is normally closed as not needed, but apparently enough people are interested in this subject to use it. The crowd for this show was noticeably more mature than is usual for Fringe gigs.

Nicola came along to my third gig, Tecuani, as she had a previous engagement at Te Papa. This show was a Mexican dance show revolving around colonialism, human sacrifice, gods, ghosts, and other shit like that. 

The following night we went to see a show that we’d actually bought tickets for – The Fabulous Fabelinskys, at Te Auaha. This is a combination of circus and play, with the story centred on a family of three women who’ve just lost the patriarch and main performer of their circus act. It follows their trials, particularly at the hands of the nefarious circus-owner who exploits them; interspersed with demonstrations of their acts – hoops and harness, high ropes, and a clown, with a sword-swallowing finale. Does what it says on the tin, and probably the best thing that I’ve seen this festival. 

My final show was Hausdown, which is a Bridgerton-esque house party at a country estate. There are various shenanigans between the guest before they finally all come out and admit that the boys are in love with the boys, and the girls are in love with the girls. Enthusiastically performed, the actors camp it up in period costumes and generally have fun.

 

Hutt Sounds

Avid readers of this blog (I imagine this is all of you) will recall that we went to Hutt Sounds last year to see Nik Kershaw and The Human League. Naturally, we were agog to find out which Eighties legends would be playing this year, and as soon as it was announced I was on to it to get earlybird tickets, because this year’s line-up includes Tom Bailey (formerly Thompson Twins) and OMD, I mean, OMG! It’s OMD! I’d been hoping to see them for a number of years, ever since they announced they’d be coming to New Zealand in 2020 with Simple Minds – a gig that was ultimately cancelled due to pandemia. 

Last year we made the mistake of missing the beginning because we weren’t that interested in the support acts. A mistake, not because we should’ve seen them, but because we found it difficult to find somewhere to put our picnic seats.

Yes, you bring your own seating to this event. It’s held at Brewtown in Upper Hutt, which has a handy field attached to it for events such as this. The day is aimed squarely at an older audience, with Eighties legends headlining, and at our age we can’t be standing around in a field for hours on end. The audience is arranged with standing at the front, then picnic blankets, low-back seating, and high-backed seating at the rear. As we’d set out in good time we found a good location near the front of the high seat area.

The afternoon kicked off at 3pm with The Narcs, a kiwi band of the Eighties. Clearly some of the audience were there for them, too, but I’ve never heard of them. They’ve also not committed any of the oeuvre to compact disc either, so I’m unlikely to hear their music again. They made a decent enough sound.

 Next cab off the rank was Diesel, who I have heard of, and even have a CD by. They hail from the Netherlands, and again, make a good rocky sound, without being particularly memorable.

 

Third was local Upper Hutt boy Jon Stevens, former singer of Noiseworks, an Aussie band who had some success in the Eighties and early Nineties. After the death of Michael Hutchence he became lead singer of INXS for around three years, before leaving to continue to pursue his own career again. The set consisted of early solo work, Noiseworks songs, interspersed every other song by a classic banger from INXS which got everyone going. 

The sun was beginning to come down in the sky as Tom Bailey took to the stage with his band – keyboardist/cellist, drummer and bass guitarist. Bailey also helped out with additional synths, percussion and guitar, where needed. They performed a set of Thompson Twins songs, all of which you know, and one cover version – a pretty good rendition of Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer. Here’s the set list. 

Tom Bailey would have been worth it as a headline act, but wait – there’s more! Eighties legends, tunesmiths and all-round innovators Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (OMD to you) were the headline act. Before they took the stage, Evolution Of Species played over the PA, accompanied by a video on the big screen at the back of the stage. This track is the dreaded “N-word” – yes, it’s New Material, from their 2023 release Bauhaus Staircase. As they took to the stage, though, it became apparent that that was almost the only one, and the rest were absolute foot-tappers from the Seventies, Eighties and early Nineties that had populated the charts years ago. Starting at the very beginning – 1979’s Electricity and 1980’s Messages, their first two singles, they then followed with hit after hit. They managed to slip another “new” song in – History of Modern from their recent (checks notes) 2010 album of the same name. You can find the full set list here. 

They finished up, inevitably, with Enola Gay, before quitting the stage at 9pm due to the curfew restriction at the venue. They left with a promise not to leave it quite so long before returning to New Zealand – their last gig in Wellington was at the Town Hall in 1986. Hopefully they’ll be back again.

 

Hope

Nicola is back on ushing duty at Circa Theatre, and first out of the blocks as a main attraction this year is Hope, a new play by New Zealand novelist Jenny Pattrick. It’s set in a fictional near future where the government (of New Zealand? It’s not specified, but dollars are mentioned as a currency in one line) has passed new legislation relating to end-of-life care. 

The play is a fourhander, and opens with a potential suicide about to jump off a bridge. He is approached by Daniel, who recognises him as concert pianist Adam, and persuades him not to jump. Adam has focal dystonia, a condition which prevents him playing the piano, and he sees no point in living if he can’t do that. Daniel doesn’t just recognise him from his fame, it turns out he knew him years ago; his mother, Irina, a refugee from Ukraine, taught him to play piano when Daniel was very young. (Yes, everyone in New Zealand does know each other!) He takes Adam to meet Irina, who has terminal cancer and has been “classified” under the new legislation, and is entitled to palliative care only. Daniel takes care of his mother, but both are in denial about the terminal nature of her disease and insist that she is “improving”.

In a separate strand, Irina’s daughter, Yulia, has just returned from war-torn Ukraine, where she worked as a nurse and witnessed the horrors of battlefield injuries. Her mother has sold the old family house and moved into a little flat to raise money to pay for black market medicines – without telling Yulia, as they split on bad terms when she left for Ukraine. Nevertheless, she has tracked Irina down and is appalled by (a) her mother’s condition, (b) her living conditions, (c) her continued support for Putin, and (d) her denial of her health.

At first, these strands are separate, but eventually all four protagonists meet and a monumental bust-up occurs – particularly when Yulia finds out about the black-market drugs that Daniel is buying; drugs that could save the lives of cancer patients whose illness isn’t as advanced. Yulia contends that giving them to her mother is wasteful as they will have no effect because she is too far gone.

The play confronts the realities of the cost of end-of-life care – the reason the legislation was brought in was to save money; but also whether it is right to give people false hope, or should they abandon hope? Eventually there is a reconciliation of sorts, but like real life, everything is messy without neat endings. Adam is given new hope over the possibility of retraining his brain to become a concert pianist again – as happened in real life to Michael Houstoun, whose music is used throughout. The family members are reconciled to each other’s differences, and Daniel continues to care for his mother who has now accepted the truth.

It's not what you’d call a barrel of laughs, but it’s the kind of thing that theatre does well, and is well-performed throughout by some of the stalwarts of Circa Theatre.

 

Ngarua Caves

Our flight from Nelson didn’t leave until the afternoon, so we stopped on our drive back to tour the Ngarua Caves. We arrived a little after 10 and discovered that there would be a tour at 10:30, so we joined that, along with around 12 other people.

We donned hard hats and met our guide, Rachel, at the mouth of the cave. I enquired about cave wētā   but it appears they don’t have any. We were enjoined not to touch any of the stalactites or stalagmites as contamination from oils on your fingers will slow down growth…which is a leisurely 25mm every 80 years. Strange units, you might think? Well, it probably started out as one inch every 80 years.

We walked through with Rachel taking up the rear to ensure no-one got left behind, and stopped at the Stop signs where she gave us a bit of information about each place, including how they were discovered in the first place: apparently an apprentice surveyor dropped a tool whilst out doing some surveying, and it fell down a hole. “Well, go and get it” said his supervisor….and presto! Caves discovered! The caves are in a rock formation caused by the collision of two plates, and are about 450 million years old. These days, electricity, boardwalks and handrails have been installed to ease our passage and we are able to explore more. Some of them had columns where stalactites and stalagmites had fused. There was also a complete skeleton of a moa that had fallen through a pothole and died down there - several such skeletons have been discovered. We ended up in a large cave unsurprisingly called The Cathedral, which was the end of the system as far as we were concerned. We then ascended a set of Death Stairs to reach the outside and emerge, blinking, into the sunlight.

We drove on from there and stopped at McCashin’s Brewery for some lunch. Last time we were there I acquired some feijoa liqueur from the bottle shop and intended to do the same this time, only to find that Nelson Council had rescinded their licence and they were unable to sell me any. Poo.

That was about the end of our travels. We dropped the somewhat muddy car off at the rental place and waited for our flight to Wellington.

Farewell Spit

We rose with the lark. Actually, well before the lark. Farewell Spit Eco Tours take you along Farewell Spit at low tide, when the intertidal zone is available, in specially-adapted buses, so the time of departure is dependent on the tides and varies by half an hour each day. On the day that we had selected low tide was early in the morning, so we needed to set out from our accommodation by 6:15 to get to Collingwood and register in time for a 7:00am departure.

We actually made it in plenty of time as there’s not a great deal of traffic at that time on a Tuesday morn in Golden Bay. We met our driver and guide, Allan, who gave us a running commentary about the history of Golden Bay and the wildlife throughout the tour.

Our first stop was at Fossil Bay, famous for its fossils. These are mainly sea shells in sandstone – the sand is made of worm poo. We saw variable and SI pied oystercatchers along the way. We then drove up along the beach in the intertidal zone. This is the best area for driving, although it is prone to quicksand – waterlogged sand which can drag an unwary vehicle down. This was evidenced by the pools appearing in the tracks of the bus in front of us (we were in two buses) as we drove up the beach. Driving is forbidden above the high tide line, as this is where the sand dunes are forming. It’s also highly inadvisable – in fact the trickiest bit of driving is getting from the road through the soft sand to the firmer sand near the sea. Allan was at pains to point out that this is where we were most likely to get stuck in the sand and need a tow from the other bus, although as it happened we didn’t get stuck at all on our tour.

As well as driving for FSET, Allan works for Department of Conservation, so whilst we were driving along he was taking observations of the sea life as well as pointing it out to us. In particular, he was noting oystercatchers with chicks, as well as checking on the status of the rotting carcasses of some whales along the beach. We were driving along the outer beach, which is not where the whales beach themselves – that’s the inner beach – but some of them are dragged on to the north side. There were also the stinking remains of a sperm whale, which had died at sea and been washed up here. As well as oystercatchers we saw black-backed gulls, ruddy turnstones, Caspian and white-fronted terns, and pied shags.

Our destination was the lighthouse which is almost at the end of the spit. The end of the spit is too unstable to support a lighthouse, or indeed any kind of structure, so it’s actually some way back from the end, and there are some other houses there as well, originally built for the lighthouse keepers. Originally it required a crew of three, with their families, to keep the kerosene light burning, but this was reduced to two when they installed electric lamps (not bulbs, apparently), and then one; and finally it was completely automated in the 1970s and is now run from Maritime NZ in Wellington. The houses are still there, though, and used by DOC and Maritime NZ to house researchers and maintenance workers.

We stopped there for a while and learned the history of lighthouse keeping, accompanied by hot beverages and muffins. There are signs at the base of the lighthouse saying “No Entry”, but, as Allan told us, “I’m not your dad and I’m not your teacher”, so if you choose to disobey the sign, go ahead…and many did. He enjoined us not to post pics on social media as Maritime NZ would soon figure out where they came from and he’d get in trouble. It’s quite picturesque around there as the first lighthouse keeper, after failed efforts to grow anything in the sand, had transported soil from Collingwood – two sacks at a time – on his fortnightly trip to town for supplies. Eventually he had enough for a vegetable garden and orchard, and planted a few trees as well.

At this point we’d normally turn around and go back, but a little further on is the gannet colony – the second-largest in New Zealand. Unfortunately we couldn’t get close but we admired them from a distance. We then turned around and headed back the way we’d come.

We stopped near the sperm whale corpse and climbed a dune, from where we could see to the south side, the inner beach, in the distance. At high tide, twice a year during king tides, the spit narrows down to a mere 200m, but most of the time the spit is between four and 17 km wide.

Our final stop was at Cape Farewell, which is at the base of the spit and is the northernmost point of the South Island – well north of Wellington, in fact. There is a spectacular arch visible there, and we saw two fur seals.

We ate our packed lunch here, before heading back to Collingwood, with Allan continuing his running commentary including how high-end restaurants in LA and New York dine on New Zealand littleneck clams caught and processed locally and airfreighted to the US in refrigerated containers. It’s big business, apparently.

We arrived back in Collingwood after around 7 hours on and off the bus, and headed straight back to our motel to rest. In the evening we checked out local Thai diner O’Sha, recommended by the motel owner.

 

Tākaka

We left Nelson and picked up our hire car at the airport, then drove the long and winding road around the bottom of Golden Bay to reach Tākaka. Our original plan involved stopping at McCashin’s Brewery on the way, having discerned from the website that they were open from 10:00am daily. When we got there, however, the 10 had been taped over and 11 written on instead, so we continued on.

We’d been advised to go to Harwoods Hole, which is also on the way so we turned off the road. The first stop was at the Woolshed, a café with a petting zoo attached, for some beverages. They have an emu.

Harwoods Hole is a cave system with the deepest drop in New Zealand. There’s an unsealed narrow road to reach the car park, along which one must look out for, and avoid, oncoming drivers. Fortunately there are wide parts of the road along the way so we didn’t encounter any difficulties, as everyone was very polite. We reached the car park and set out on the 45-minute walk to the Hole. You can’t actually get to the hole without falling in and there are dire warnings at the beginning of the walk about this:

We walked through the beech forest on a clearly marked track, a bit muddy in places, looking out for wildlife on the way. We saw South Island robins, a tomtit, waxeyes, fantails and weka along the way. The way back was the same as the way there so we covered that somewhat quicker, then sat in the car eating cheese scones from the Woolshed under the beady eye of another weka – they’re notorious scroungers – but didn’t feed it.

We then headed back up the unsealed road and on to Tākaka to find our accommodation on the edge of town. Having deposited our stuff we walked into town to explore and find venues for dining over the next three nights. A short stop at Fresh Choice to stock up on breakfast goods and we were ready to go.

In the evening we went out to the local bar, Roots, for burgers and Captain Cooker beer.