23/08/2026
Was invited by One Question Theatre to give a critical response to Passionfruits, an already much heralded new play written by Laim Hinton and co-directed by Hinton and Ruby Brett, whose too-brief run concluded at The Meteor yesterday.
With other reviews out there I fear mine is too little and too late. Apologies if it was expected in a more timely fashion. As below.
Standing ovations are hard won, or at least they should be. At the conclusion of the second of the three nights of Passionfruits' tragically short run at The Meteor, I would say nearly half the sold out house stood in appreciation at the artistry we had witnessed. The larger concentration of this number was across the stage from me - the staging was traverse - and looking at their rapturous response I dithered no longer and rose to the vertical position myself. This was not the performative gushing seen and heard too often by many junior supporters of the Hamilton theatre scene, feeling the need to volunteer their loyalty to a cast member or a heavy-handed ideological moment, it was genuine and sincere respect, reflective in many cases of profound emotional engagement with challenging but never less than intelligent material.
As I say, this response was not unanimous. Passionfruits is about a dysfunctional family and the nature of that dysfunction could well have been too confrontational for some. At the interval I was told that one audience member for whom Colin Hodkinson's performance as Roy Ashford, the old-school, grumpy patriarch, a man wedded to firmly disciplining children and the type of corporal punishment that generations of New Zealanders were raised on, was such that it required her to absent herself from the theatre entirely. This response too was a sincere tribute to not only Hodkinson's work - his finest, that I have seen - but also to Liam Hinton's complex, multi-leveled script and the equally assured direction of Hinton and Ruby Brett.
If there is a whiff of Chekov about the title and elements of the scenario Passionfruits is no Cherry Orchard. The titular fruit, referred to but never seen, is having a bumper crop, less a product of Roy's green fingers than problems with the septic tank on the rapidly deteriorating property where he and his long-suffering wife Helen raised their three children and where their youngest, the profoundly unwell Emelia, continues to reside in her late twenties. Human effluent that can no longer be contained is rising up, a stinky fertiliser and metaphor for the disquiet about to be visited upon the Ashfords as they gather on Christmas Day, 2009. Helen, fastidiously dusting at outset, desires peace and harmony in the wake of Roy's mini-stroke but sons Shaun and Lance, respectively a struggling builder and a successful architect, have a secret agenda. Better to destroy the house and start afresh than salvage a place of bitter, formative memories.
One's age and/or world view may well play a part in how each character is received. Hinton's writing skillfully intertwines the personal and the political, touching on gender and ideological issues but thankfully resisting the temptation to damn any position outright. The parents voted for John Key and Lance's wife Brooke works for a National MP; "Aunty Helen"'s reign is over and arch-capitalist Lance masks his private insecurities by parading his bank account. Against this, sickness beneficiary Emelia and Lance's wife Leah, embrace the artistic and the environmental, the latter, a one-time teacher challenged by her daughter Riley's emerging eating disorder and son Jake's potential autism.
It's a heady mix, even without cinematic-like flash-forwards which either spell out or hint at the future fate of characters. Hinton and Brett are fortunate indeed to have such a talented cast to deliver brittle, lyrical and at times brilliant lines, an ensemble that, whatever the individual strengths, is most certainly stronger than the sum of its parts.
Nick Hall has always shined playing unsympathetic characters but here he outdoes himself as Lance, especially in Act II, where the whining self-pity and desperation are stripped of faux wit and his vitriol has tragic consequences.
Chanelle Harrison's Emelia also becomes more strident in the second half, full of leftist bluster and buzz words but commands the stage especially in her Act I monologue concerning her niece's future life, unusually placed structurally but the stronger for it, the beauty of the words and the delicacy of delivery achieving poignancy.
Ruby Brett, as Leah, has her own tour de force moment, revealing the details of a sexual encounter with more frankness than bourgeois Hamilton theatre audiences are accustomed to, the shock all the greater because it reveals a side of the character not immediately apparent. This is a play of constant surprises and revelations and the late introduction of a corporeal element, complementing anxious talk around fertility, is happily unsettling. Likewise Sam Armstrong's strong cameo as a (presumed) vagrant looking for his dog, seems a touch out of a Luis Bunuel movie, albeit one of the surrealist's darker pictures.
If there are no weak links in the supporting cast - and too little space here to do everyone justice - the throughline performance that most impresses is that of Tracey Slaughter as Helen, the only character who has everyone else's interests at heart. Helen's sustained but increasingly vain efforts to stop her family from tearing itself apart, especially when the action moves on a decade to 2019, embracing the hardening of political extremes, finds delicate and true expression on such an elevated level that distinctions between amateur and professional theatre collapse.
Her plea for the notion of "loyalty" to be an abiding principal in family life, cutting across whatever wider cultural progressions or regressions, had a stark power to it, a testament to a values system of a rapidly disappearing generation.
In an ideal world Passionfruits would have played a couple of weeks at The Meteor. Better still, it would command packed houses at the BNZ Theatre up the road. Hamiltonians would seem to have an appetite for high cultural works at their new edifice - orchestra and opera - as well as inoffensive children's musical comedy like Matilda. Perhaps it's a pipe dream that a quality, homegrown play could draw such crowds. Let's just be grateful that artists like Hinton - mindful of Chekov's edict that it is "not the duty of writers to solve problems, but to correctly state them" - are flourishing at all.
