- Le Sud Queenstown
Memorial Theatre, Saturday, October 16
Reviewed by Matt Stewart
The play imagines an Aotearoa colonised by the French in the South Island and the British in the north.
The action centres on a summit involving a group of politicians from the South and their northern counterparts.
The French squad of Prime Minister Francois Duvauchelle (Nick Dunbar), Energy Minister Dominique Le Bons (Heather O'Carroll) and Minister of Indigenous Affairs Tama te Tonga (Mark Ruka) meet hapless "North Zealand" Prime Minister Jim Petersen (Gavin Rutherford), energy spokesperson and Maui Party member Moana Maree Matakana (Olivia Robinson) and coalition partner, New Right paramour Lyndsey Marsland (Barnaby Frederic).
The energy-rich Gallic mainlanders have decided to increase the power price from $2 per unit to $4, but the poverty-stricken North can only afford $2 as their country hurtles towards economic catastrophe.
Aside from ill-fated sexual bargaining, the northerners realise they have no exports with which to beat the price down, and end up offering their southern cousins the only thing they have left to offer - P, or methamphetamine.
Not one stratum of society is immune from ridicule - Le Sud does not give us the entitled, chuckling venom of Paul Henry and his ilk, but our Aotearoa as seen through an affectionate comic kaleidoscope.
"The key to political satire is to love people, not hate them," writer Dave Armstrong says.
Everyone gets the once-over - politicians in all their ideological stripes and skin tones.
Likewise, women, men, Maori, Pakeha, lumpy Anglo-Celts, gays and lesbians all get a good roasting as the dysfunctional pollies battle through matters political, economic and sexual before joining in mangled unity.
Actor Mark Ruka said over the 18 months of the hit play's run there had been a few ruffled feathers - mainly in the North Island.
South Islanders had "embraced the play as their own", Ruka said.
