Theatre Company: Red Leap Theatre
Director: Kate Parker and Julie Nolan
Cast: Emmett Skilton, Julia Croft, Veronica Brady, Alison Bruce and Justin Haiu
Location: Mercury Theatre

Synopsis (from Auckland Festival brochure):

Henry lives alone. He reads poetry. He writes poems and tucks them into different places, his pockets, between books, under furniture. Henry has been on a few dates but they never seem to work out. Then he meets Lumina and he can’t quite believe her. How she captures his thoughts like the pages of a book, how she wanders in his mind like letters on the wind.

Love illuminates. It makes us bold. It makes us take risks.

Performed by an ensemble cast under the direction of Kate Parker and Julie Nolan, Paper Sky incorporates striking visual imagery and physicality to unfold a love story as intimate as the space between two people and as epic as the sky.

Thoughts on this Production:

This was a fantastical tale imaginatively told.

Like The Arrival, which I enjoyed two years ago, it included a brilliantly versatile set that is masterfully changed throughout. Also, without speech, it found inventive ways of conveying messages.

It was also very funny. In the early stages of the play, there were three alter-egos for the main character. The way they interacted with the main character, and with each other, to emphasise his emotions were probably the highlight for me.

If I understood the story correctly, the mystical female love interest literally gave her male suitor a small package containing what he needed (confidence, hope, love?) to be able to face the world outside his apartment - and the possibility of romance with his very real neighbour.

At times I found the amount of puppetry (especially the parts where the main characters were looking for each other across vast plains of paper) a little wearying . At those times it seemed like the story might have been built around the puppetry rather than the other way around. But that was not enough to detract from my overall enjoyment of the performance.