At the end of June, award-winning playwright and journalist Sam Brooks led a workshop on critical engagement at Auckland’s Basement Theatre. At just two hours long, it was brisk, but attendees absorbed and discussed concepts and strategies around engaging with and responding to theatre, and fundamental approaches to writing reviews. The workshop adds to a slowly growing network of initiatives to counter a small and struggling arts media landscape. Opportunities to develop into, and even be, a critic are scarce. With that in mind, The Big Idea has offered participants of Brooks’ workshop an opportunity to publish reviews.
Here is the first, by Sebastian Taylor (They/Them), an actor who graduated from the Unitec school of performing and screen arts in 2023. Sebastian's mask training under Pedro Ilgenfritz instilled in them a lifelong love of physical theatre, which has led them to their current training at Massive Theatre Company. Sebastian's favourite shows are ATC's Tiri Te Araroa: Woman Far Walking, Indian Ink's Guru of Chai, and Silo Theatre's A View From the Bridge.
Sketch comedy performed by a zoo
Sebastian Taylor
The tagline “Somewhere between a Monty Python sketch and BBC nature documentary” was scientifically engineered to get me to buy tickets – I would binge every BBC doco on repeat if they weren’t so annoyingly difficult to get outside of Britain. I knew I would be attending when I found out Georgia Pringle – a comedian who appears on shows like Bullrush and Friday Night Laughs – had devised a 60 minute show on the animal kingdom as her debut solo work.
Nature Brain is a sketch comedy show that uses sketches to shepherd the audience through dozens of animals’ peculiarities. Rather than narrating in the fashion of a documentary, Georgia inhabits each and every animal bodily, with the aid of a little costuming. Her wholehearted commitment to the animals' physicalities shines throughout the show, fully diving into the challenge she’s set for herself as she contorts into birds, insects, and mammals alike. Contort is the right word, some animals, the stoat especially, are exercises in extreme athleticism. Physical theatre being my passion, the moments of clearly readable physicality were my favourite. During the stoat’s hypnotizing dance (that’s a real animal behaviour!) I was transported to my own memory of watching the National Geographic documentary, and saw more stoat than Georgia onstage. This was contrasted however by some animals whose physicalities I couldn’t identify without being told.
Like any show that’s comprised of a collection of sketches, I loved some but not all of the offers on display, in much the same way that some animals are simply cuter than others. Regardless, the sheer breadth of animals in Georgia’s arsenal kept me excited for the next, and her untiring pace makes me think she could have performed a three hour epic covering the entire animal kingdom. Maybe we’ll get the opportunity to see that with a sequel, I know I’d come back to watch Nature Brain: Blue Planet.
The use of projections in the show wasn’t entirely successful for me. I was morbidly enraptured by a video segment demonstrating Georgia's willingness to roll through gorse bushes for our entertainment, but I found myself disengaged when animal facts were projected as a means of transitioning between sketches. As a lover of animal documentaries, I should have been the target audience for interesting facts, but it felt like extracurricular reading between the fun parts of the show. Ultimately what I was missing was Georgia’s voice teaching us the information herself. One of my favourite parts of devised performances is feeling the performer’s connection to the subject material. I felt Georgia’s love of animals through her physical commitment, but I was left wanting to hear more of that passion from her voice. This was something I only realised after a segment of improvised crowdwork where Georgia responded to the audience’s favourite birds. In that moment I was captured by her impressive knowledge and appreciation of animals as she produced detailed facts at the drop of a hat.
My expectations were misled by the description “Nature brain is all about looking for answers and explanations for why we behave the way we do by looking to the natural world around us.” I was searching for a through line between the sketches that wasn’t there. We did get a sense of reflecting on human nature at one point, with a much appreciated dig at homophobia and transphobia through the lens of banana slugs’ hermaphroditism and a community of cum-stealing sapphic salamanders. However the degree to which I enjoyed these segments made me realise that I was hoping for a bigger picture scope across the board. I was left imagining a version of the show that leant harder into the political elements of its premise, especially due to our government’s recently proposed bill to develop conservation land.
That being said, Nature Brain succeeds at what it aims to do. If you want a whimsical romp through nature, you won’t be disappointed. I came in expecting more BBC and less Monty Python, but most people will actually be glad their comedy show is more Monty Python than BBC. It says something about me that I would happily pay to sit through a 60 minute lecture on bird sex, and I know this for a fact because my favourite sketch was a deep dive on the intricacies of sex among different animal species (everyone loves a great tit!). A little educational and very eccentric, Nature Brain is the BBC documentary that doesn’t take itself seriously, with a zooful of sketches starring a zooful of animals.
