[What’s Your Bus Number?]
Absurd, playful, and freshly imagined. Co Theatre Physical have as soon as once more produced an comedic and engrossing piece. Mixing bodily theatre, up to date transport woes, dwell music, and lightweight viewers interplay, Wheel Head, written by Beth Kayes in collaboration with Katie Burson, is a stunning and charming 50 minutes.
We are launched to Joanna (Katie Burson), Aucklander and Birder extraordinaire, who finds one morning her automotive has been stolen and dumped some 4 kilometres away from her house. 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 guy Bird 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 battling empathy on the job (Beth Kayes) and Tūī an anthropomorphic chicken girl with youngsters to boost and rats to combat (Irasa Si’ave).
Si’ave’s Tūī is a revelation. With Si’ave’s intensive Commedia dell’Arte coaching it’s little surprise that this Tūī is so completely pitched and the physicality is so gratifyingly truthful. This is a personality that should seem on our levels once more and will properly change into a inventory character in her personal proper.
On prime of the assorted hilarious programs of motion completely 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 energy of the performers that give the work the polished execution that may normally belie a brief growth interval.
The work is strongest when Lucas Haugh’s musical accompaniment lends the motion punchy rhythms or the blaring of a horn. Adding to the world created by the paraphernalia of biking and a few playful exaggeration of the scale 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 completely 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 via the spokes of a bicycle wheel.
As Bar-Tailed Godwits, deconstructed bicycles, and orange street cones swirl in regards to the stage, jokes are nimbly laid right down to resurface later to renewed laughter. Wheel Head in the end arrives at a satisfying and round conclusion regardless of the various transferring elements and the quick runtime. Even trying to recount the occasions of Wheel Head ends in laughter. This pleasant present was to not be missed.
Wheel Head performs the Loft at Q Theatre 22nd – 25th of February 2023.