By Carol Fifield
There’s something immediately disarming about walking into Thistle Hall not knowing whether you’re about to watch a comedy variety hour, a poetry recital, or a public unravelling. F.ART is an immediate contradiction – a three-man solo show about addiction. And I just can’t get enough of it.
The space does a lot of the heavy lifting before the show even begins. Thistle Hall already carries the bones of a community meeting space, and tonight it leans all the way in. It feels like an AA meeting and is, appropriately, a dry event. Raro and water only. We’re gathered to celebrate three years of sobriety for our host, Bain. The tone is light. The stakes are not.
The show fractures in the most satisfying way. We meet Shane and Ben, Bain’s alter egos, who serve as both his foil and his saboteurs. It’s a meeting of the minds made literal, the push and pull of recovery embodied in real time. What could easily feel like a gimmick instead becomes the show’s engine. The three-man solo conceit is clever, but more importantly, it’s honest. Recovery can’t be accomplished alone. It needs a community.
The performance begins long before the official start time. Bain meets us at the door, already in it, already convincingly nervous about his own show. It’s a clever tonal seed to plant, and doesn’t feel staged so much as a taster of what’s to come. When doubt creeps in, that’s when the alter egos arrive. Shane bursts forward the moment Bain starts giving up on himself, all swagger and short-term thinking. We’ve all met a Shane. He lives entirely in the now. Then there’s Ben, the sensible counterweight, the voice of restraint and routine. Watching the two of them battle it out onstage for Bain’s future pulls us completely into the tug-of-war. You feel every teeter toward relapse, every possible outcome hovering in the air. It’s sincere and convincing.
Poetry threads through everything. It would be easy for verse to feel indulgent in a show about addiction, but here it feels necessary. The rhythm carries the story forward, gives structure to chaos. At times, the script feels almost Shakespearean. Heightened, deliberate, loaded with metaphor, yet never losing its grounding. The language serves the struggle, not the other way around.
Technically, it’s tight. Lighting and sound land with precision, underscoring emotional pivots without overwhelming them. Shows like this live and die by their timing, and they’re both sharp, comedically and dramatically. The show understands that addiction isn’t just tragedy; it’s repetition, boredom, temptation, absurdity. The daily wrangle with sleep. The itch of relapse. The quiet, persistent voice that suggests just one more. We’re taken through it without melodrama, but without mercy either.
Thistle Hall itself ends up being a character in and of itself. It’s an additional layer of meaning laid on top of an already deep production. A room built for community housing a story about isolation. A celebration of sobriety staged in a space that feels like the work itself. It’s fitting. It’s raw. It’s perfect.
F.ART is funny in places, confronting in others, and unflinchingly personal throughout. It doesn’t pretend recovery is tidy. It doesn’t pretend three years fixes everything. What it does do is invite us into the room of one person’s head, and trusts us to sit with it. It’s an evocative look into the cycle of addiction and sobriety that’s as funny as it is poignant. Because healing isn’t linear. Sometimes it’s poetic. Sometimes it’s ridiculous. And sometimes, against the odds, it’s both.
And sometimes it’s Shania Twain.
Disclosure: As a somewhat active member of the Wellington performing arts community, I may be quite familiar with a number of the performers in this show. Having said that, I am not a liar, and there is zero bias in my reviews, shut up.
Also, tickets were provided to me for free by the production. Literally changes nothing, though