Auckland's Fringe Festival will play host to writer/director Ben Anderson and his play about a man who misses out on the apocalypse, becoming trapped in a supermarket as the only human left on earth.
Anderson realized his theatrical vision while working a job at a supermarket alone and feeling confronted with solitude and loneliness. Carrying those concepts as overarching themes behind the play, Anderson's message touches on the fact that every human is essentially isolated, regardless of how much contact they have with others. The journey of the trapped man is to face his fear of aloneness without avoiding the pain, which is an experience universal to all of us. In many ways it is an idea that can work to bring an audience together in a sense of communal understanding, sharing in emotions common to all but perhaps often left unacknowledged. While the theme appears dark, Anderson's use of handmade puppets tells the story with a degree of fun absurdity, retracting some of the heaviness to add a dimension of light humor around such a morbid concept.
This supermarket apocalypse puppet-thriller will have you laughing and leave you thinking. So grab a friend for an evening of poignant, theatre, or go it alone and enjoy the sense of solitude.