Erin Harrington responds to three rehearsed play readings at the Festival of New Theatre: Ella West’s Mrs Parker, Ana Mulipola’s My Mum Stitches, and Andrew Todd and Cathasaigh Ó Fiannachta’s The Consummate Professional, presented in partnership with Rollicking Entertainment at the Isaac Theatre Royal, Sunday 11 October 2026.
Making theatre is amazing, and it is hard. The Festival of New Theatre, an initiative from Rollicking Entertainment and the Isaac Theatre Royal, is an attempt to support new work, connect creatives and audiences, and enrich our fragile creative ecosystem. The last iteration ran two years ago; this year’s event, held across a weekend, offered workshops on devising, pitching and writing alongside professionally staged readings of three works in development, selected from a large pool of applications. These sorts of formal and structured staged readings are one of the ways through, given scripts need extensive development and feedback opportunities. These are thin on the ground – although there’s nothing stopping anyone from making their own fun in this regard, so long as the feedback itself is constructive and useful.
I was on a panel earlier on the Sunday with Juanita Hepi and Dr Pedro Ilgenfritz, where we were thinking through some of the challenges facing the development of new work (for varying definitions of ‘new’ and ‘work’). Theatre is a living, breathing entity with its own types of conventions and language, and scripts are blueprints for performance, not words that live on the page. For traditional scripts (for varying definitions of ‘traditional’!), it’s essential to have actors, directors, and audiences involved.
Mrs Parker, My Mum Stitches and The Consummate Professional are three very different plays, each in different stages of development, and each offering new perspectives. This isn’t a review, really – and that’s not necessarily something you want at this soemtimes vulnerable stage of development – but an account of the works as they were presented for their second round of readings, and the conversations that happened after during post-performance question and answer forums.
Ella West’s Mrs Parker addresses a significant gap in New Zealand theatre (at least recently) – work about working people, that engages with our political and social history, and highlights issues in the present day. This reading, directed by Mel Luckman, had a long list of characters played by four actors: Krystal O’Gorman, Matt Hudson, Kim Te Pairi Garrett and James Kupa. It dramatizes the story of Jean Parker, who worked for the IRD in Dunedin, and who in 1956 was selected by the PSA as an early test case in the legal fight for pay equity. At the time there were different pay rates for men and women, and women were denied meaningful pathways to promotion and other privileges. Parker won her appeal but was then demoted, and her case was debated in Parliament; West’s script draws extensively from Hansard, which is illuminating in its rhetoric. This is obviously and painfully relevant today, given the way massive pay equity claims were nuked by the coalition government. The play features key figures in the case – activist Margaret Long (nee Brand, aka ‘Firebrand’), Walter Nash, Sidney Holland – as well as actual and composite characters like Jean’s husband, drawing from interviews, letters, and archival research. It explores domestic life and relationships in mid-50s New Zealand, and shifts in gender roles. It interrogates the function of collective action, but also the burdens it can place on individuals who face disproportionate consequences, and how this all sits within wider social structures, including families, workplaces, and communities. It ends with victory, but we understand this to be one victory in an ongoing, difficult fight.
West’s reading, and the kōrero afterwards, was particularly illuminating, as the work in progress sits at a few different crossroads. It started off as a film project, which is apparent in the storytelling and scene structure, but is now being developed from the stage, which has a very different set of conventions and challenges. It wants to be as ‘accurate’ as possible (West’s words), but also needs to function as a standalone piece of drama, told through the language of theatre. It draws from some terrific Hansard material (edited, but otherwise verbatim), but also takes dramatic licence with events and characters. It is heavy on didactic, expository text (to the exclusion of subtext), and is still figuring out what its characters want, but also teases some interesting conventions, like a possible narrator and some potentially metatextual stage language. It explores 1950s work and domestic life, but also left the audience wanting more. West described the ‘emotional truth’ of the play as “we have so much further to go” – a terrific impulse – and Jean often stares out the window, inviting speculation through a strong visual metaphor. The script as it stands gets across a lot of facts of the case, but I was left wondering whether accuracy is actually truthful, and whether creative storytelling can instead get to the heart of matters in ways that are less direct but more nuanced and impactful. There is a lot of potential here, and lots of choices to be made; this is the perfect time to give a work like this to performers and an audience.
Where Mrs Parker is quite literal, Ana Mulipola’s work My Mum Stitches is dreamy and impressionistic. Mulipola is well known as a poet (and co-founder of FIKA Writers Collective) and a songwriter. The work, her first play, draws from 20 years’ worth writing, and includes original poetry, music and song, all to explore grief, love, belonging, family and migration. Teuila (Zandra Ah Jay-Maepu) is grappling with the death of her mother; the play is a fluid exploration of her emotions and her attempts to piece things together. The action moves between Aotearoa and Samoa. She is joined variously by her late grandmother (Tusi Elisara) and her inner child (Talia-Rae Mavaega) as memory mingles with rumination, guilt, longing, love, shame, and hope. She speaks with a white male therapist, a useful interlocutor and narrative gauge, and while he prompts introspection, he is thoroughly divorced from her cultural context. Western frames meet contemporary Samoan experiences of migration, family and cultural dislocation. Director Jake Tupu reads the short scenes’ titles, which I loved, and which I hope is retained somehow in the completed work, as this signposting supports the structure while being highly expressive. The work is a textured collection poems, songs, and sequences of dance and movement. There’s Siva Samoa, clapping games, moments of play, song, call and response, fragments of memory, laughter, tears. The dramaturgy in this reading is really sound, with seamstress mum’s sewing informing the sense of a theatrical quilt, of the work of collation and connection.
If this were a staged play I would not be reviewing it; this is a Pacific play speaking to Pacific experiences and families. I’m a Pākehā woman with no kids and very few wider family connections, and I know there is a lot I just am not attuned to nor have the right to speak to, even though I love the work and will pay cash money to go see it when it hopefully eventuates. This means I feel like an absolute jerk during the talanoa afterwards, cringing at myself while asking whether more can be done with the therapist. It’s not because I think a white dude needs more presence and subjectivity in a play about Samoan women, but because at a dramaturgical level the friction of his presence is prompting really interesting things theatrically (especially as he is played subversively, to everyone’s delight, by Elisara), and there’s maybe more juice to get from the device. Other comments, from people who aren’t out of touch white ladies, speak to the power of intergenerational characters on stage, the role of Teuila’s inner child as healing force, the exploration of mothers’ vs fathers’ expectations, and how meaningful it is to have a Pacific piece in the setting of the Isaac Theatre Royal, a beautiful but deeply colonial building. There is so much love in this session; Mulipola refers to the work as “removing the fear of trauma dumping”. Applause, song, flowers. Tupu calls for more Pacific work, more Pacific playwrights, especially in Ōtautahi.
The third work, Andrew Todd and Cathasaigh Ó Fiannachta’s black comedy drama The Consummate Professional, is an entirely different affair. This two-hander, an earlier version of which won the 2025 McNaughton South Island Play Award, opens as a stand-up show. Comedian Blake, a self-described “long time pervert” and low status dirtbag, tells the story of a transformative experience he had the night he taped his widly successful Netflix special. He was looking to celebrate, but was also newly sober. Instead of falling back on his usual methods (drug and alcohol fuelled sexual encounters, extreme self-abnegation) he books a sex worker for the full porn star experience at his hotel room. Enter Darcy, a fantasy come to life, but Blake’s wish-list and his sense of what we actually wants is derailed a bit as the pair have a professional meeting of the minds (and then bodies). Director Georgie Sivier introduces the work by saying that the Venn diagram of comedians’ and sex workers’ jobs is close to a circle. Both are professional performers who wear various masks (upon masks), create a parasocial sense of intimacy, and work to fulfil the customers’ expectations, and sometimes their clients are pretty shitty. A gig is a gig is a gig, but occasionally a bit of honesty slips through.
The work is meta, very funny, and thoughtfully staged, with a clear sense of theatrical language. It draws from both authors’ professional experiences – surely sex work is another form of corporate entertainment? It’s also surprisingly tender and wholesome, given Blake has an epiphany in the shower during some piss play. I’m particularly interested in how it sets up the expected structures of both the stand up special and the play with a play (within a play), and then subverts them to dramatic effect, particularly as Blake’s story bends unexpectedly into Darcy’s. Onion layers of vulnerability peel back, and playful conventions, such as pulling us into a cheesy talk show or a public demonstration of orgasmic vocal arts, have a fascinating push-pull effect with the audience’s sense of emotional proximity. It demonstrates that you can really get to the truth of things by coming in sideways.
There’s a lot of chat afterwards about staging, Darcy’s stage presence, the role of the audience, and the ways actors Will Burns and Lizzie Tollemache grappled with some of the scripts’ challenges. It’s nearly rehearsal ready though – thanks, in part, to earlier development readings 18 months ago at Little Andromeda. Scriptwriting is slow and lonely, and just one part of the finished project, but with the right support the process works.
The Festival of New Theatre ran Friday 9 – Sunday 11 October, 2026,
