Erin Harrington reviews Oceania’s Eleven, performed, produced and designed by Vincent Andrew-Scammell, at Little Andromeda, Thursday 25 June 2026.
A few figures before the review: Creative New Zealand, which “encourages, promotes and supports the arts in New Zealand for the benefit of all New Zealanders through funding, capability building, our international programme and advocacy”, hasn’t had its very low rates of baseline government funding increased in twenty years, bar a blip in 2019, whether the government of the day has been friendly, indifferent or hostile to the arts. In 2025, this contribution accounted for 0.01% of overall government spending. In fact, this year’s budget made cuts. CNZ is otherwise supported by Lotteries funding, which doesn’t keep up with inflation or demand, and funding arts through the proceeds of gambling is a real moral grey area. Some of the most recent CNZ funding rounds had success rates of 6%-11%. In 2022, the median income for creative professionals was $37000 – less than the adult mimum wage.
And yet, the creative sector contributes to more than 4% of our GDP (on par with agriculture, forestry and fisheries’ direct contribution). The majority of New Zealanders think that the arts should receive public funding, and that the arts improves NZ society. NZ art, culture and creativity is a major export, and a key element of the country’s international brand strategy. It makes our lives better. Everyone benefits.
There’s a pretty big gap in there.
Vincent Andrew-Scammell’s excellent, very ambitious, and extremely cheap heist show bobs around in this (Danny) ocean of contradictions and financial neglect. It rips its structure and tone from films like Ocean’s Eleven, opening with Vincent, in a scruffy black suit and turtleneck, breaking his way into the CNZ offices in Auckland to find documents that will explain why he was turned down for $17000 worth of funding to make the show. Something in the documents doesn’t add up, plus how come there’s some guy slow clapping in a corner, congratulating Vincent on uncovering the first part of the mystery?
The show sketches out a conspiracy that connects the giant hole in government arts funding to the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior. Vincent, reluctant early-mid career hero, is the only guy who can round out a crack international team of grifters, sifters, hackers and weirdos, each with an axe to grind, to get deep into the Louvre (and more besides) to find the truth of the matter. He’s got some souped-up New Balance sneakers, a gun, a tube of Berocca that might be booby trapped, and all the goodwill a Kiwi abroad can handle. Cue 1960s orchestral sting, cue montage, cue action.
Andrew-Scammell is doing all this by himself, by the way, which is outlined at the start through credits drawn on cardboard with vivid. It’s like his previous, very good show CLAS103: Greek Mythology but on hard mode. Bar the well-executed lights, he’s done everything else – he’s pre-recorded the thoroughly impressive foley and score entirely using voice and mouth noises, and he’s operating it all on stage with a laptop (marked TOP SECRET) and a clicker. He’s romping through dozens of characters and well-executed accents alone, as if his life depends on the resultant showreel. (It might!) The story is convoluted and satisfying, hitting its caper genre beats. It’s fast and extremely physical, persistently teetering on the edge of failure in a very entertaining way. This premiere is a little fuzzy at the edges at times and it runs long, but it’s so engaging, and Andrew-Scammell so charming and focused, that I suspect people would have been happy for it to go on all night.
We eventually discover what’s happened to CNZ’s lost dosh, and what the pesky French have to do with it all, but perhaps the real wealth is the friends and adventures we got along the way. Or maybe not. The show’s overt takeaway message is that this industry feels like a heist, and that art is an investment in the soul. The show’s more defiant stance is that artists will keep making work whether supported or not; Oceania’s Eleven is far from the only charismatic bare bones show I’ve seen in the last wee while that has been spitting in the face of austerity.
I said before that this has been done on the cheap, but not if you factor in time, training, and years of expertise, and the unpaid assistance of others. Not if we look at the real costs (human, sunk, in kind). That’s the real crime, and no David Holmes soundtrack will make it more palatable. If this is what a talented individual can do with an op shop costume and Audacity on the smell of an oily rag, imagine what magic they can make with some actual support. Unless some of the shadowy people (i.e. ministers, decision makers) who pull the strings behind the scenes start to address the problem we might not know. Let’s not fade to black.
Oceania’s Eleven plays at Little Andromeda until Saturday 27 June 2026.
Flat City Field Notes 