Tusk Tusk - Next Big Thing Festival

Auckland Theatre Company
TUSK TUSK - MEDIA RELEASE

For immediate release.

Next Big Thing Festival supports budding actors, designers and crew to strut their stuff on and off stage.

Auckland Theatre Company proudly presents the New Zealand premiere of TUSK TUSK, a new play from award-winning playwright Polly Stenham (That Face), which opens on Friday 6 July, at The Basement, as part of the Next Big Thing Festival, a two-week season of the best of local and international work for young audiences.

Skins meets Home Alone in this funny and heartbreaking drama by London's hottest young playwright.

Three siblings, Maggie, fourteen, Eliot, fifteen, and Finn, seven, are home alone in an unfurnished flat: living nocturnally, avoiding neighbours, eating cold Chinese takeaway, awaiting a call on a cell-phone that never rings. What are they waiting for and where the hell is Mum?

"Tusk Tusk is often remarkably funny, as well as exceptionally touching."- Daily Telegraph

Dancing a fine line between hilarity and heartache, TUSK TUSK is a n absorbing drama about a dysfunctional family.

Hera Dunleavy directs an impressive young cast, including two seven-year-old primary school students, Flynn Allan and Arlo McLean, who play the youngest sibling Finn: part-Lost Boy, part-Max from Where the Wild Things Are .

"Tusk Tusk is a play about the incredible bond between siblings, which is intensified in an extreme situation, such as having a parent go missing" - Time Out, Australia

The NEXT BIG THING, is a year-long youth company, open to anyone 15 -25, based at Auckland Theatre Company that provides a bridge from high school to drama school and between full-time training and the professional industry.

"It is a hothouse for new talent: a place to develop new work and new ways of working." says Lynne Cardy, Auckland Theatre Company's Associate Director.

Tickets can be purchased from Auckland Theatre Company on 309 3395.

ENDS

PRODUCTION INFORMATION

TUSK TUSK
By Polly Stenham
06 -21 July, 6.30pm
The Basement

Starring:
Flynn Allan, Lucelia Everett-Brown, Arlo Gibson, Arlo McLean, Nilianne Ualiu with guest appearances by Michelle Leuthart and Matthew Norton.

Direction: Hera Dunleavy
Design: Jessika Verryt, Caitlin Brogan, and Michael Forkert.

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