Coro
New Athenaeum Theatre
Friday, March 20
Reviewed by Mariane Poole
Coro at the New Athenaeum Theatre on Friday night was a sellout for the Dunedin Fringe Festival.
The long-standing tragedy is rebooted out from the cobbles by comic duo Nina Hogg and Austin Harrison as presented by Mon Platon Productions.
Hogg and Harrison have strong pedigrees in theatre which ranges from their studies in performing arts in Te Whanganui-a-Tara to rave reviews from staging the show in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Their success through a well-honed performance is well earned.
The parody is beautifully paced, engages with the audience from the outset, and expanded by audience participation.
It includes contemporary local political references, clever and honest improvisations and structured script encompassing nine characters assisted by far-flung costume changes.
All are readily assisted by the audience. We are encouraged to sing the solidly working class brass band theme. We all know it very well.
Coro ranges through the predictable train-wrecks of soap opera: teenage pregnancy, skulduggery, affairs of heart and state, panic and dating apps.
The plentiful puns come fast and furious, leaving the audience in constant full body laughter. Just the tonic we all need in times of trouble.
Coronation Street is a common guilty pleasure, everywhere, it seems, other than in the United States. Perhaps Americans are poorer for not having access to a tragedy which constantly revels in the predictability of secrets and lies, good intentions and bad outcomes, that the mad and bad will all be eventually outed by a community which knows everyone else’s business.
Over its decades Coronation Street has canvassed many of society’s ills, including racism, homophobia, adolescent pregnancy, serial killers and topically narcissistic psychopaths.
Strangely, it has received very few satiric reinventions, yet its collection of stereotypes makes it a sitting duck.
This excellent parody is not to be missed.
