Erin Harrington reviews Friends to the End, created and performed by Wiremu Tuhiwai and Brendon Bennetts with Criss Grueber, at Little Andromeda, Friday 12 June 2026.
The award-winning improvised theatre show Friends to the End feels like it needs a graphic novel rather than a written review. There’d be a lot of pow and thwop and kablammo, a bit of oh no! and it’s behind you!, and a few stylish full-colour, full-page spreads in which our heroes, played by Wiremu Tuhiwai and Brendon Bennetts, cower in front of a giant Tesla-branded transformer that’s hell bent on taking over their street (and also the world).
This is a delightful show about two childhood friends negotiating the challenges of getting older and hitting new life milestones, and then also dealing with the apocalypse. Which is more challenging to your relationship – your best mate’s girlfriend wanting to move in, or a robot uprising that turns one of you into an evil supercomputer? Probably the latter but not by much.
Bennetts and Tuhiwai introduce the show by talking about how they’ve been buddies for twenty-odd years but they rarely get to perform together, so why not make a show together? Any adult realising that they must programme organised fun to see their friends will relate. Some conversations with the audience pull out details from that intense period of early adolescence where friendships are enormous and all encompassing, and songs feel like they are written just for you. These offers – smoking in the bathrooms at boarding school, listening to Sophie B Hawkins, Minecraft LAN parties – offer texture to the relationship between two boys, Aaron and George, who we meet eating too-hot toastie pies at the age of six. A paper fortune-teller gives us the apocalypse that will disrupt their adulthood years later: a robot uprising, apt on the day that Elon Musk was announced as the world’s first trillionaire.
The show starts with delightful, character-led vignettes that establish the dynamic between the pair, the nature of their shared kid logic, and their relationships to the wider world. These scenes feel like the sort of beloved stories repeated later: do you remember the time we ran super-fast at the beach and chopped some wood with your dad? The time we did scrumpy hands at school? By the time the apocalypse kicks off in the pair’s late twenties this has established the stakes, namely, that it’s a hetero life mate love story and bros don’t let bros down.
Then the bad stuff pops off and the show shifts genre into a very entertaining comedy / sci-fi / action narrative with well-placed story beats. Tech operator James Shera is clearly having a lot of fun lighting this new world in lurid reds and moody blues, and the smoke machine gets a pounding. From here the show does what good genre work does by both fulfilling and subverting expectations. It’s a really smart and narratively satisfying way to structure a format. The action is legible and often very funny, thanks to the pair’s relaxed but precise style of performance, and the offers become central to the world-building in unexpected ways.
This is also where muso Criss Grueber comes into his own, improvising a responsive action-packed soundtrack as robots attack, Bennetts is abducted, and Tuhiwai retreats to rebuild society in the sewers with a motley collection of craftspeople while hatching a plan to get his friend back. I don’t know where improvised theatre and comedy would be in this city without Grueber – he’s become the glue that sticks the form together, and the frequent straight man to whatever is going on on-stage, whether at big outdoor summer shows or small pieces like this.
It ends, as it must, with a climactic fight – kapow! – and a return to the emotional core of the show. Friends to the End is big and small, absurd yet sincere, as much ‘I think I need to go home and call my old flatmate’ as ‘finish him’. Highly recommended.
Friends to the End plays at Little Andromeda until Saturday 13 June 2026.
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