A bright, dark magic

Pack your bags and head to Hannah Playhouse: award-winning theatre company Trick of the Light will carry-on their national tour of The Suitcase Show in Wellington on the 26^th and 27^th of March.

“The show draws on the strange experience of travel, and the stories and surprises that might be found inside a suitcase”, writer and performer Ralph McCubbin Howell says. The masterful production utilises everything from lo-fi shadowplay to wireless projection, dancing disembodied hands, and crackling 70s stereos to present an eclectic boxset of short stories spanning climate change and astronauts, autocrats and the secrets we carry with us.

The result is, as The Scotsman calls it, “a bright, dark magic”.

The Suitcase Show reunites McCubbin Howell with company co-founder Hannah Smith and Emmy Award-winning composer and long-time collaborator Tane Upjohn-Beatson (The Bookbinder, The Road That Wasn’t There). In true Trick of the Light style, the team developed the work through a series of showings in site-specific spaces. A photography darkroom was one!

The Pōneke-based ingenious, imaginative inventors have spent the past decade touring works such as The Griegol and Tröll around the world, with the UK, China, Aotearoa, and Edinburgh on the list for 2024.

“It was so exciting to share our work with audiences from completely different cultures and countries and find that they still respond to the motor of a good story”, McCubbin Howell says of their previous performances of The Suitcase Show. “When we open a new suitcase and everyone gasps, it’s the kind of collective experience you can only have in a theatre.”