Pammie and Angel have a more than usually fractious mother-daughter relationship.
Self-dramatising Pammie (Perry Piercy) has a bad habit of getting sloshed and making a spectacle of herself, and is too silly to be really likeable.
Teenage Angel (Bronwyn Ensor) is more interesting; despite preferring most of her interaction with the world to be mediated by her iPhone, she's scathing beyond her years and has perfected the arts of eye-rolling and scornful incredulity.
She has no interest in travel (''If I want to see it, I can google it''), so when Pammie organises, if that's the word for it, a trip to Europe, she's furious.
After a predictably chaotic departure from Auckland airport the pair are off to the delights, surprises and disasters that await them in Dubai, London and Spain.
Apart from the two performers, who as well as playing Pammie and Angel give us glimpses of Pammie's vicious mother, Angel's stoned Dad and various other colourful minor characters, there isn't a lot to look at.
The set, designed by Ioan Bramhall, is stylish but necessarily bare because of the many different locations it has to represent. A heap of suitcases, inventively used, constitute the props, and occasional projected images, plus lighting design by Stephen Kilroy and sound design by Lindsay Gordon, help. As always, Maryanne Wright-Smyth's costumes are spot-on.
Written by Ellie Smith and directed by Jonathon Hendry, One Perfect Moment had its world premiere on Saturday night. It combines a pleasantly conventional comedy, rather slow-moving and not extraordinarily funny, with travellers' tales of the kind most of us can tell, and has the slightly dated feel of the kind of ''women's play'' that became popular in the 1980s. Strong points are the quality of the performances and Pammie's and Angel's gradual arrival, through shared experiences and trials, at something like mutual understanding.
-By Barbara Frame
