Jack McGee
By the time we find our seats in Circa Two, it’s all but clear that Kamala Harris has lost the election. The tone of the room is far from sombre. Sure, there’s the occasional sad-sack (myself) wearing it on their face, but mostly people are chipper, excited. It’s rare for me to come to a local show where I know there are fans in the crowd. Not friends of Penny Ashton, fans. Dyed Hot Pink in the wool, branded-tea-towel-purchasing, social-media-following, real, loyal, fans. Ashton is here to give them what they want.
The beautiful thing about art, theatre in particular, is how it’s moulded by the context in which it's presented. The Tempestuous is a lot of things. It is the oft-performed and tightly rehearsed experience her fans have come to expect, filled with copious amounts of agile word-play, expert literary references, and good-natured raunch. But it’s also this night, this room, this crowd. It’s The Tempestuous, colon, subtitle - Seen in Circa Two, On Election Night.
The Tempestuous as Comedy.
With acclaimed shows about Dickens and Austen under her belt, it’s a given at this point that Penny Ashton is well read. It’s one thing to understand writing, it’s another to know it inside in and out, to the point where you can contort it, twist it, dance on it. What is potentially undersung is how strong a wordsmith she is, completely separate from the great works of literature she turns into her playgrounds.
Before Tempestuous is anything, it is a 90-minute vehicle for Ashton to hop between characters and deliver one-liners. It’s no surprise that her promotional tea-towels have taken off, she’s the master of engineering wit condensed to tea-towel length - “What man from yonder window bakes?” Alongside these deftly-reworded-idioms, she’s no stranger to setting up a long joke with a gloriously groan worthy payoff. Jeopardy style, I’ll let you imagine what led to the punchline of “Minstrel Cycle”.
The show is densely packed with these sorts of jokes. A tribute to thorough craft, nearly every line feels rigorously composed. Thankfully, Shakespeare is so thoroughly integrated into the English language that we as an audience don’t have to work too hard to process any of the allusions. In an interview with Sam Brooks for the Spinoff, Ashton acknowledges this inherent accessibility - “the quotes are so famous that I can play with them… whereas with Austen and Dickens I had to quote them in full.”
To break up her dialogue, which is often suffocating in it’s swiss-watch-precision, Ashton has scattered in pieces of audience interaction. These show off her character work, demonstrating that she’s built these personas strongly enough that they don’t fall apart when she doesn’t have a pre-prepared line to fall on. More importantly, they display her ability to get out of the way and let someone else get the laugh. Some of the show's best lines come from the mouths of audience members. Being unexpectedly thrown on stage gives them no time to overthink things, which leads to everything they say feeling innocent, and earnest. This contrasts beautifully with Ashton’s winding wordplay, giving us all a moment to breathe out.
There is accounting for taste. I’m not a Shakespeare fanatic, and I’ll admit that I’m often admiring jokes more than I'm laughing at them. The hour and a half disappears quickly nonetheless. Ashton has been around the world and back performing. It shows. She has an attention-pulling professionalism that almost dares you not to be entertained. Honestly, and I mean this without a hint of facetiousness, I’d pay to watch her read the phone book. She’d find two or three killer puns before reaching Ada Andrews.
The Tempestuous as Shakespeare Adjacent.
In the past eighteen months, Circa Two has seen three productions of Shakespeare-adjacent plays. In May last year, we had Jamie Cain’s The Coven on Grey Street, in February this year, we had Sam Brook’s Lads on the Island, and now, Penny Ashton’s The Tempestuous.
Anyone following the film (or Broadway) industries will be aware that pre-existing intellectual property is now all but a prerequisite for work with a medium-to-high budget. It shaves the risk off of creating something, if the brand has a pre-existing base. Putting myself in the shoes of the Circa Council, or any major programming body, it’s easy to see a similar thought process. We’re a city of unemployed public servants so the safest bet is still a hell of a swing. While this approach has undoubtedly led to huge wins (as anyone who tried to get a last-minute ticket to Ashton’s Sense and Sensibility can tell you), there’s still been many a small house.
I have full faith in the integrity of the artists behind these shows. I don’t think it’s selling out to write a Shakespeare adjacent play, nor would I blame anyone for it if it was. These are all rich, personal, and compelling texts - Lads on the Island is easily one of my favourite shows of the year. Because of the programming desire for works like this, there is a huge incentive for artists to come up with projects that fit this criteria. Which I would argue as a trend has the unfortunate side effect of limiting our perspectives.
The Coven on Grey Street essentially serves as Macbeth fan fiction. What if the witches all wound up in Aotearoa? Cain uses the premise as an opportunity to mine contemporary family drama and tension, jumping headfirst into the complexities of the witches sisterhood. Lads on the Island is the closest to a direct adaptation of the three, drawing heavily from The Tempest, and even then it’s 95% Brooksisms and 5% Shakespeare. The setting adds flavour and theatricality but the broad beats would still largely function if it was instead set in an Auckland apartment.
The Tempestuous is the hardest to pin down. While it’s certainly influenced by The Taming of the Shrew, it’d be a serious stretch to call it a direct adaptation. Ashton has aptly framed the play as thus, cheekily calling it “a shrew’d new comedy”. It’s a pastiche of Shakespeare in general. His tropes, his language, even his characters, are all thrown into a soup together.
At the thematic heart of the play is a desire to insert agency, humanity, and depth to women within a Shakespearan narrative. In the aforementioned Spinoff article, she mentions becoming “fucked off that women were perceived as bags of menstrual breeding, that was all they were good for, so you had to protect them, or hide them, or whatever.” This anger is palpable in the show, there’s a defiance to how she frames her female characters in relationship to both Shrew and Shakespeare in general. Our protagonist, Princess Rosa, is a riff on Katherina from Shrew - a headstrong woman being pushed towards marriage against her will. While Katherina is essentially domesticated by the end of the play, Rosa prevails with her autonomy intact. She’s found love but on her terms. Her love-interest, a kind hearted baker, is a side-kick not the protagonist. It’s a refreshing shake-up, and cathartic to watch.
In contrast with her contemporary additions, Ashton finds both comedy and sad profundity in the things that haven’t changed over the past 400 years. The integration of a The Bachelor-style sheen to our Shakespearean love-games draws parallels rich enough to have English teachers all over the motu pricking their ears. Shakespeare is not a coat of paint over Ashton’s comedy, the conversation she’s having with his work is threaded into the very foundation of the show. Speaking singularly for the individual work, this is a blessing, but for our wider theatre landscape is a curse.
All three of these plays have to reckon with the text (or texts) they’re adjacent to. One of the benefits of theatre as a medium is that it has the ability to be truly local. It can be art by our community, for us, leant an immediacy and relevance by being able to be made quickly. While these Shakespeare adjacent conversations are worth having, what does it say that they’re all having to textually exorcise the demons of plays written half a millenia ago? Why must we consistently frame ourselves through the bard’s lens?
This is not Tempestuous’s sin, nor does it belong to Coven, Lads, or even really Shakespeare. Wilde is IP in much the same way as Shakespeare, as is Austen. Nor is this a disavowment of us engaging with our theatrical legacy. Playscript is tradition. Re-stagings or interpolations of the classics create a line through history. It’s easy to get romantic about. Consider this an impassioned plea for audiences to support original work. There’s a lot to be said for a balanced diet.
To validate ourselves and our stories, we need to consider them as worthy of being a place worth starting from. Inherently any play in the English language will always be in conversation with Shakespeare. Odds are, in this review I've unwittingly used words or phrases of his. We can’t escape that, nor do we need to. But there’s something quietly defiant in relegating the cultural wrestling match to the meta-text. Currently our programming is reinforcing the same canon it’s plays are trying to re-examine or subvert. It doesn’t feel like a fair fight.
The Tempestuous as seen on Election Night.
During the 2016 election, I was 16 years old. At the start of the day, I was convinced that Donald Trump was going to lose. By mid-afternoon, I was sitting in the Central Library trying to do homework, refreshing the results every minute in disbelief. Come evening, I’d booked myself into the next movie showing at Readings Courtenay - Ben Affleck’s highly-questionable-actioner The Accountant. It worked. I escaped for two hours. By the time I emerged down the escalator, it was official. I went to Tommy Millions, ordered a slice of pizza, and stood miserable as the server shook his head at me in disbelief.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
On election night, 2024, I long for that clearness of mind. There was a simplicity to the 2016 election, largely due to the fact I was a suburban teenager. Things weren’t simple then, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Shock horror, the bad guy won. Now everything feels complicated.
“It feels surreal to be discussing theatre while a genocide is underway, largely ignored, even tacitly enabled by our leaders…” Sameena Zehra writes in this year's Playmarket Annual, “But surely the midst of conflict is the very time art and artists are most important.” To some extent, any art being made currently is in some way or another about Gaza, even if only in the sense that it serves as an escape. Zehra herself is at Tempestuous, and praises the show on Circa’s instagram as “a gorgeous way to spend some time, especially in dark times”.
Kamala Harris, with the blood of over 40,000 Palestinians on her hands, is not someone I can root for. Her opponent has clearly stated his intentions to sustain the war on Gaza, all while declaring war on women and trans individuals in his own country. He is somehow so much worse. That day, I find myself desperately hoping that Kamala wins, checking and rechecking the polls, while never feeling safe to stop and think about what will continue to happen if she does. Or if she doesn’t.
Near the end of Ashton’s show, she breaks the script. She draws a direct parallel between the sexist Shakespearean world she’s subverting and the world of today. She states that four hundred years later “in the tightest of races, they’ll ignore the woman and choose the rapist.” She tears up, as do I, and I’m struck by the sadness of how tragically current the narratives she’s challenging are. I’m also struck by the sadness that two things can be true at once. I cling to Ashton’s speech, wanting things to feel straightforward again. I am no longer watching The Accountant.
The Tempestuous.
The Tempestuous, colon, subtitle - Seen in Circa Two, On Election Night is a show about both loving and struggling with Shakespeare. It’s a show about women, about our theatre landscape, and about intellectual property. It’s about both craft and spontaneity, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It’s not about Gaza, which makes it about Gaza. It’s a raft I'm clinging to. It’s a funny show that makes me cry. It does exactly what it says on the tin and I have no clue where to put it. Try as I might, I can’t fit it on a tea towel.
The Tempestuous as Comedy.
With acclaimed shows about Dickens and Austen under her belt, it’s a given at this point that Penny Ashton is well read. It’s one thing to understand writing, it’s another to know it inside in and out, to the point where you can contort it, twist it, dance on it. What is potentially undersung is how strong a wordsmith she is, completely separate from the great works of literature she turns into her playgrounds.
Before Tempestuous is anything, it is a 90-minute vehicle for Ashton to hop between characters and deliver one-liners. It’s no surprise that her promotional tea-towels have taken off, she’s the master of engineering wit condensed to tea-towel length - “What man from yonder window bakes?” Alongside these deftly-reworded-idioms, she’s no stranger to setting up a long joke with a gloriously groan worthy payoff. Jeopardy style, I’ll let you imagine what led to the punchline of “Minstrel Cycle”.
The show is densely packed with these sorts of jokes. A tribute to thorough craft, nearly every line feels rigorously composed. Thankfully, Shakespeare is so thoroughly integrated into the English language that we as an audience don’t have to work too hard to process any of the allusions. In an interview with Sam Brooks for the Spinoff, Ashton acknowledges this inherent accessibility - “the quotes are so famous that I can play with them… whereas with Austen and Dickens I had to quote them in full.”
To break up her dialogue, which is often suffocating in it’s swiss-watch-precision, Ashton has scattered in pieces of audience interaction. These show off her character work, demonstrating that she’s built these personas strongly enough that they don’t fall apart when she doesn’t have a pre-prepared line to fall on. More importantly, they display her ability to get out of the way and let someone else get the laugh. Some of the show's best lines come from the mouths of audience members. Being unexpectedly thrown on stage gives them no time to overthink things, which leads to everything they say feeling innocent, and earnest. This contrasts beautifully with Ashton’s winding wordplay, giving us all a moment to breathe out.
There is accounting for taste. I’m not a Shakespeare fanatic, and I’ll admit that I’m often admiring jokes more than I'm laughing at them. The hour and a half disappears quickly nonetheless. Ashton has been around the world and back performing. It shows. She has an attention-pulling professionalism that almost dares you not to be entertained. Honestly, and I mean this without a hint of facetiousness, I’d pay to watch her read the phone book. She’d find two or three killer puns before reaching Ada Andrews.
The Tempestuous as Shakespeare Adjacent.
In the past eighteen months, Circa Two has seen three productions of Shakespeare-adjacent plays. In May last year, we had Jamie Cain’s The Coven on Grey Street, in February this year, we had Sam Brook’s Lads on the Island, and now, Penny Ashton’s The Tempestuous.
Anyone following the film (or Broadway) industries will be aware that pre-existing intellectual property is now all but a prerequisite for work with a medium-to-high budget. It shaves the risk off of creating something, if the brand has a pre-existing base. Putting myself in the shoes of the Circa Council, or any major programming body, it’s easy to see a similar thought process. We’re a city of unemployed public servants so the safest bet is still a hell of a swing. While this approach has undoubtedly led to huge wins (as anyone who tried to get a last-minute ticket to Ashton’s Sense and Sensibility can tell you), there’s still been many a small house.
I have full faith in the integrity of the artists behind these shows. I don’t think it’s selling out to write a Shakespeare adjacent play, nor would I blame anyone for it if it was. These are all rich, personal, and compelling texts - Lads on the Island is easily one of my favourite shows of the year. Because of the programming desire for works like this, there is a huge incentive for artists to come up with projects that fit this criteria. Which I would argue as a trend has the unfortunate side effect of limiting our perspectives.
The Coven on Grey Street essentially serves as Macbeth fan fiction. What if the witches all wound up in Aotearoa? Cain uses the premise as an opportunity to mine contemporary family drama and tension, jumping headfirst into the complexities of the witches sisterhood. Lads on the Island is the closest to a direct adaptation of the three, drawing heavily from The Tempest, and even then it’s 95% Brooksisms and 5% Shakespeare. The setting adds flavour and theatricality but the broad beats would still largely function if it was instead set in an Auckland apartment.
The Tempestuous is the hardest to pin down. While it’s certainly influenced by The Taming of the Shrew, it’d be a serious stretch to call it a direct adaptation. Ashton has aptly framed the play as thus, cheekily calling it “a shrew’d new comedy”. It’s a pastiche of Shakespeare in general. His tropes, his language, even his characters, are all thrown into a soup together.
At the thematic heart of the play is a desire to insert agency, humanity, and depth to women within a Shakespearan narrative. In the aforementioned Spinoff article, she mentions becoming “fucked off that women were perceived as bags of menstrual breeding, that was all they were good for, so you had to protect them, or hide them, or whatever.” This anger is palpable in the show, there’s a defiance to how she frames her female characters in relationship to both Shrew and Shakespeare in general. Our protagonist, Princess Rosa, is a riff on Katherina from Shrew - a headstrong woman being pushed towards marriage against her will. While Katherina is essentially domesticated by the end of the play, Rosa prevails with her autonomy intact. She’s found love but on her terms. Her love-interest, a kind hearted baker, is a side-kick not the protagonist. It’s a refreshing shake-up, and cathartic to watch.
In contrast with her contemporary additions, Ashton finds both comedy and sad profundity in the things that haven’t changed over the past 400 years. The integration of a The Bachelor-style sheen to our Shakespearean love-games draws parallels rich enough to have English teachers all over the motu pricking their ears. Shakespeare is not a coat of paint over Ashton’s comedy, the conversation she’s having with his work is threaded into the very foundation of the show. Speaking singularly for the individual work, this is a blessing, but for our wider theatre landscape is a curse.
All three of these plays have to reckon with the text (or texts) they’re adjacent to. One of the benefits of theatre as a medium is that it has the ability to be truly local. It can be art by our community, for us, leant an immediacy and relevance by being able to be made quickly. While these Shakespeare adjacent conversations are worth having, what does it say that they’re all having to textually exorcise the demons of plays written half a millenia ago? Why must we consistently frame ourselves through the bard’s lens?
This is not Tempestuous’s sin, nor does it belong to Coven, Lads, or even really Shakespeare. Wilde is IP in much the same way as Shakespeare, as is Austen. Nor is this a disavowment of us engaging with our theatrical legacy. Playscript is tradition. Re-stagings or interpolations of the classics create a line through history. It’s easy to get romantic about. Consider this an impassioned plea for audiences to support original work. There’s a lot to be said for a balanced diet.
To validate ourselves and our stories, we need to consider them as worthy of being a place worth starting from. Inherently any play in the English language will always be in conversation with Shakespeare. Odds are, in this review I've unwittingly used words or phrases of his. We can’t escape that, nor do we need to. But there’s something quietly defiant in relegating the cultural wrestling match to the meta-text. Currently our programming is reinforcing the same canon it’s plays are trying to re-examine or subvert. It doesn’t feel like a fair fight.
The Tempestuous as seen on Election Night.
During the 2016 election, I was 16 years old. At the start of the day, I was convinced that Donald Trump was going to lose. By mid-afternoon, I was sitting in the Central Library trying to do homework, refreshing the results every minute in disbelief. Come evening, I’d booked myself into the next movie showing at Readings Courtenay - Ben Affleck’s highly-questionable-actioner The Accountant. It worked. I escaped for two hours. By the time I emerged down the escalator, it was official. I went to Tommy Millions, ordered a slice of pizza, and stood miserable as the server shook his head at me in disbelief.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
On election night, 2024, I long for that clearness of mind. There was a simplicity to the 2016 election, largely due to the fact I was a suburban teenager. Things weren’t simple then, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Shock horror, the bad guy won. Now everything feels complicated.
“It feels surreal to be discussing theatre while a genocide is underway, largely ignored, even tacitly enabled by our leaders…” Sameena Zehra writes in this year's Playmarket Annual, “But surely the midst of conflict is the very time art and artists are most important.” To some extent, any art being made currently is in some way or another about Gaza, even if only in the sense that it serves as an escape. Zehra herself is at Tempestuous, and praises the show on Circa’s instagram as “a gorgeous way to spend some time, especially in dark times”.
Kamala Harris, with the blood of over 40,000 Palestinians on her hands, is not someone I can root for. Her opponent has clearly stated his intentions to sustain the war on Gaza, all while declaring war on women and trans individuals in his own country. He is somehow so much worse. That day, I find myself desperately hoping that Kamala wins, checking and rechecking the polls, while never feeling safe to stop and think about what will continue to happen if she does. Or if she doesn’t.
Near the end of Ashton’s show, she breaks the script. She draws a direct parallel between the sexist Shakespearean world she’s subverting and the world of today. She states that four hundred years later “in the tightest of races, they’ll ignore the woman and choose the rapist.” She tears up, as do I, and I’m struck by the sadness of how tragically current the narratives she’s challenging are. I’m also struck by the sadness that two things can be true at once. I cling to Ashton’s speech, wanting things to feel straightforward again. I am no longer watching The Accountant.
The Tempestuous.
The Tempestuous, colon, subtitle - Seen in Circa Two, On Election Night is a show about both loving and struggling with Shakespeare. It’s a show about women, about our theatre landscape, and about intellectual property. It’s about both craft and spontaneity, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It’s not about Gaza, which makes it about Gaza. It’s a raft I'm clinging to. It’s a funny show that makes me cry. It does exactly what it says on the tin and I have no clue where to put it. Try as I might, I can’t fit it on a tea towel.