“Young love will kick the chairs about and like a rush-fire burn” – James K Baxter

Blame rock and roll. Blame slick-back heart throb James Dean. Blame the pulp fiction of Mickey Spillane. New Zealand in the 1950’s was on the cusp of a cultural transformation that was sweeping the world. In the aftermath of world war, the USA’s influence on the South Pacific was irresistible. Brassy, consumerist America had unleashed new appetites in a land of conservative Protestant Kiwis. The first to wholeheartedly adopt American Influences were a new and vivacious subculture that would go on to remake our world –Teenagers - and their unbound energies triggered a moral panic that would end at the gallows.

Based on real characters and events, ALBERT BLACK is a Kiwi Rebel Without A Cause, set amongst (as a newspaper described it at the time) – “a wasteland of warring juveniles, delinquents, teenage sex, no parental supervision, all-night dives, blaring jukeboxes – even a cult built around the banned books of Mickey Spillane.  

Vivid as a comic book, the play follows Belfast immigrant Albert Black – a frowned on Bodgie – as he scrapes by in the conservative and surreal New Zealand of the mid-fifties... a country in the grip of a crime wave which could have been ripped from the pages of one of Spillane’s hard boiled paperbacks: the Parker-Hulme murder, the Milk Bar Murder and the notorious Jukebox Killing that leads Albert to his tragic demise.

Written by Peter Larsen.
Directed by Jarrod Martin.

Cast: Jackson Bliss-McCauley, Alistair Browning, Seamus Ford, Sophia Johnson, Abigail Laurent, Rachel Nicholls, Claudia Nixon, Preston O’Brien, Ruby Payne, Ashlee Rayes, Vanderal Talagi, Lane Twigden, Dan Veint, Devon Webb, Courtney Yanez