Trick Of The Light Theatre Presents: Suitcase Show

Having spent a decade touring shows around the world, award-winning Wellington theatre-makers Trick of the Light are no strangers to travel. The company has toured their work across the UK, Australia, South Africa and North America and this year will make their debut in China. Premiering at Gryphon Theatre from 29 February to 2 March 2024 at 7 pm their latest work, Suitcase Show, packs many stories into a collection of suitcases.

Suitcase Show is an eclectic box set of short stories. Dark, spiky, and comic, each one is told out of a suitcase. The staging is inventive, from lo-fi shadowplay to wireless projection, from dancing disembodied hands to narratives that crackle from a 70s stereo suitcase. Tiny in scale, but expansive in story, the work has been built through a series of showings in unusual spaces, from a pub to a photography darkroom. This Fringe season will be its full-length premiere.

Suitcase Show was created with environmentally sustainable touring in mind – with a small company, and freighting forming the onstage design, and everything from the set, to the lights and the sound pulled directly from the suitcases.

“We were inspired by the peculiar condition of travel, of packing your life down into a suitcase, but also specific experiences we’ve had over the years,” says writer/performer Ralph McCubbin Howell. “From the time we raised eyebrows at airport security by putting a cast of my dad’s decapitated head through the scanner; to the time we spent a very cold night in our car in Iceland when we got out by the late sunset.”

Trick of the Light is renowned for crafting inventive shows and intricate narratives. Suitcase Show reunites multi-award-winning collaborators Hannah Smith, Ralph McCubbin Howell, and Tane Upjohn-Beatson. Their last show, The Griegol, took out Director, Composer and Production of the Year at the 2022 Wellington Theatre Awards. Previous work premiered at NZ Fringe has gone on to tour the world. Tröll was first performed on the staircase of an Aro Valley flat, and The Bookbinder premiered in the backroom of Arty Bees Bookshop – last year saw them tour it to the UK and USA and adapt it for a show with Auckland Philharmonia.

Suitcase Show

Previews: 5:30pm, 27–28 Feb

Season: 7pm, 29 Feb–2 Mar

Gryphon Theatre – 22 Ghuznee Street – Bookings at fringe.co.nz

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