23/08/2026
Yesterday's unpaid toil did not stop at the completion of one theatre review. Gaslight Theatre opened their latest production on Saturday night and extended an invite.
The Waikato Times, bless them, posted it quite quickly and I've attached a link. You know the drill: DON'T CLICK ON IT, go directly to their website.
Here's the text, anyway.
Waikato theatre goers looking for an estrogen boost to counterbalance the surge of masculinity sweeping the country as the All Blacks reassert global rugby dominance would be well advised to get themselves to the Gaslight Theatre in Cambridge. The Appleton Ladies' Potato Race, which opened Saturday night, a handful of hours before the triumph at Ellis Park, certainly served this critic well by way of figurative inoculation, a veritable direct route to one's feminine side.
Enjoying an all female cast, albeit - ironically - under the direction of a man, the 2019 play by Australian journalist and broadcaster Melanie Tait could be thought something of an Ocker contemporary classic, the stage equivalent of The Castle, if perhaps cross fertilised with Clare Booth Luce's The Women and given an explicit but seldom heavy handed feminist message.
A small rural community - one that could well resonate with local agrarian types - serves as the setting for a comedy of extremely bad manners. Appleton might be named after a fruit but its less-than-lucrative farming industry centres on spuds, more fair dinkum than diddly dee. Socially, the year pivots around a rural show - micro Field Days, if you will - whose high point is a race where competitors are handicapped by being required to carry sacks of this bounty. Since 1988, the Sheilas have enjoyed their own race, albeit one where the prize money is but a fifth of the men's.
Enter Penny Anderson, general practitioner and le***an, raised in the town and now back to practice her profession post divorce. She reconnects with childhood friend Nikki Armstrong, the hardest working person thereabouts and reigning women's race champion. As show day looms Penny's frustrations with Appleton come to fixate on the inequity of the potato race stakes. Initiating a campaign to redress a perceived injustice, she endangers her fragile reintegration, straining friendships both new and longstanding.
Gaslight has a wonderful stock company of established performers and two of these veterans serve the material impeccably. Kim Burn, dry and deadpan in delivery of choice, highly witty lines, is arguably the backbone of the piece, playing Bev Armstrong, the hardbitten long serving organiser of the show, challenged of late by health concerns as well as entirely unseen masculine burdens at home. It is though Burn was born for the role, commanding the stage as completely in direct monologues to the audience as in conversation with Bev's life-long friend and fellow show workhorse, Barb Ling, never milking the lines just placing them perfectly with seasoned comic timing. The actress fully grasps the central irony of Bev, that the woman most resistant to change is through a life long of action Appleton's most central and powerful feminist, circumventing male indolence and incompetence and just getting on with the job.
Ling, whose character has a secret that the playwright elects not to spell out directly, offers another variant on this template, bearing up to the stigma of childlessness with a brave public face which disguises private anguish. Sara Young has as much fun with the Ocker accent as Burn - the pair's chemistry is palpable - additionally offering a moving study of rural femininity, tough and strong yet also quietly vulnerable.
Rebecca Donne, cast in the lead part as the crusading physician, also sustains a rapport with her character's antagonist, Lauren Old's Nikki Armstrong. The dramatic heavy lifting is in good hands with these two and Tait's writing captures the particular tension that exists between contemporaries whose adult paths have diverged radically but who will be forever bound by a shared past. It would be unnecessarily pretentious to claim the characters as two sides of 21st century Australian womanhood, particularly as the humanity brought to the parts transcend such trite labels, but there is certainly a contrast between the academic and the pragmatist evident in this relationship. The fire and the rage on both sides feels real, a considerable achievement given the comedic context.
Jesse Stevens-Hapi, who made so memorable a Gaslight debut in last season's Christmas production as a seemingly Martha Raye-inspired elf, rounds out the cast as Rania Hamid, a Syrian refugee who has landed in Appleton and decided to make the best of it. The part allows Tait a few reflections on Australian racism and immigration policy but thankfully these are kept in check and Stevens-Hapi is such a warm, natural presence that the message-making is equally humanised. The actress has the makings of a star. In fact, she's one already.
Director Dennis Fenwick, who also called the shots on New Zealand's first performance of the play three years ago, clearly knows the work inside out and ensures smooth pacing and faultless transitions. On a sold out opening night there were no lines dropped or other noticeable missteps, rather a group of talented women, as united as their characters at play's end, collectively resolved to enrich and entertain a highly receptive audience.
I suppose some might quibble that there are few indications in Tait's script of the more charitable side of male behaviour. No men are seen and all referred to would seem abusive or lazy bastards, drunkards, stroke victims or drunk addicts. Possibly this is an accurate representation of contemporary Australian masculinity - with little relevance to the New Zealand patriarchy, of course - and in any case if not I am sure they can take a joke. My only other complaint was that The Appleton Ladies' Potato Race left me wanting more: more time with these characters, more acerbic dialogue and effortless one-lines and especially a more graphic representation of the titular contest.
