ConArtists, those veterans of thigh-slappingly hilarious long-form improv concepts, are playing a three-week season of a steamy, scandal-ridden medical soap opera “so hot they won't show it on television!” performed live on stage.
The blurb tells us that we are to decide the fate of each episode that plays out at Grey Lynn Hope Hospital, although it's only at the start that we are called on to determine the vehicle (bus) and weather condition (windy) by which the randomly selected character (Hamish Parkinson as minority character Tamati Goldstein) has been rendered into a deep, deep coma.
Nevertheless, such small details established at the start, determine which character will pull a gun in hospital in the hour-long episode's climactic scene (Penny Ashton as Charge Nurse Glendene Rattray), and set in motion a series of familiar, gloriously second-rate scenes of passion and intrigue, slander and gossip, squabbling and of course sex.
The hopes and aspirations of Grey Lynn Hope are to a large degree in the hands of Dan Bain as CEO Brian Richardson, an easily distracted, unnervingly infantile nutcase not a million miles from Blackadder 3's Prince Regent or the IT Crowd's irrepressible Doug Reynholm – only Kiwi, of course.
Read the full review here.
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