A battle between rival school pupils armed with swords and pikes broke out in Dunedin yesterday.
Otago Boys' High School and John McGlashan College pupils dressed in skirts, waved pointed objects and hurled hurtful words at each other.
And that was just a rehearsal.
Bonnie Prince Charlie must have made the blood run cold when it premiered in the OBHS auditorium last night.
''It's a narrated dramatisation of the 1745 rebellion between the Jacobites and the English Redcoats,'' Dunedin co-director Kimberley Fridd said yesterday.
''We thought it would be fun to make Otago Boys' the Jacobites and John McGlashan the Redcoats, to make the most of the school rivalry.''
The play is presented by the Hamilton Celtic Community and was developed in Hamilton and Dunedin.
''A lot of Celtic people want to be better informed about their heritage and historical events and this is an opportunity to go back to our heritage,'' Hamilton co-director Cecilia Mooney said.
The production also features Otago Girls' High School pupil Ariana Robertson (15) singing a Celtic solo, fiddlers and pipers.
Bonnie Prince Charlie - Prince Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Severino Maria Stuart - is on at OBHS again tomorrow.
Beware of Australian snake oil salesmen in town.
Melbourne vaudeville comedy troupe Porcelain Punch have been beguiling the gullible and innocent with their ''Travelling Medicine Show'' in the Fortune Studio Theatre.
Be wary of their bedevilling charms and ulterior motives.
Enter their red velvet-draped lair and sample their antique elixirs at your peril.
These shysters will distract you with great acts of comedy, music, song, contortionism and extraordinary feats of derring-do, while seducing you with the so-called ''magical healing properties'' of their Porcelain Punch ambrosia.
You have been warned.
Righty oh, I'm off to A Play About Space at the Globe Theatre, which I'll tell you about tomorrow.
Today at 6pm, the Blue Oyster Project Art Space re-enacts one of the most popular Fringe performances in recent years - Christchurch artist Audrey Baldwin's Canker, in which she licked her way out of a toffee box.
It should be sweet.
