From Another Woman is a new experimental play from renowned New Zealand playwright Sam Brooks, starring Renaye Tamati in a compelling one-woman performance.
The stage is minimal—a backdrop of scrunched-up paper (all taken from Brooks’s own apartment) with rolls of blank receipts hanging from ceiling pipes. A single chair sits at the back of the room.
The opening scene is like checking your inbox on Monday morning. An announcement from HR informs us that Penny is leaving and will be replaced by Jo, wrapped in the usual platitudes—they will be missed greatly . . . this is a new opportunity, etc.
The twist in From Another Woman is that it is exclusively through emails, meeting invites, HR memos and receipts that we witness Jo and Chris navigate their professional (and not-so-professional) relationship: inside jokes build, email sign-offs shift from cheers to x. The play carefully builds tension as we watch an emotional affair playing out in real time. But who is watching?
The lighting shifts hint at an outside observer—a disconnected fourth person that intermittently reads off receipts from Le Garage—a bottle of Man O’ War sauvignon blanc, a Garage Project pilsner, an oat milk coffee.
We learn Chris and his wife share a bank account—maybe she also pulled the receipts from his pockets. Maybe she sees his Spotify activity and notices Top Sade Songs of All Time: Made for Chris by Jo. It raises the question: how else could she be spying on Chris’s life?
“In the intimate Basement Theatre space, Tamati’s performance is mesmerising, but it’s easy to imagine her commanding a larger theatre just as effectively.”
But maybe she has every reason to be looking. Chris is clearly too close to someone else. The oat milk, coffee and wine—are those really his usual choices?
Tamati’s performance is impeccable. She seamlessly embodies both Chris and Jo, punctuated by interludes from HR and the unknown observer. Her ability to shift between characters is nuanced—not just vocally but physically. As Jo, her shoulders are tight, her hands held close to her body. As Chris, she leans back, relaxed, punctuating moments with finger guns. In the intimate Basement Theatre space, Tamati’s performance is mesmerising, but it’s easy to imagine her commanding a larger theatre just as effectively.
For all its experimentation, From Another Woman feels like safe subject matter. An emotional affair between a woman and a married man in an office is well-trodden territory. Perhaps the most subversive element is that Jo appears to be Chris’s superior, adding a layer of power dynamics and a possible nod to female leadership under scrutiny—echoing themes from Halina Reijn’s film Babygirl (2024). But the play only gives the briefest mentions of the way women in authority are so quickly labelled as bossy or micromanagers.
As someone working in corporate leadership in my thirties, I see emails full of HR jargon every day. I’ve witnessed how office relationships evolve in real-time. It’s rare to feel like you are exactly the intended audience for a show—or maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I was too close to the material to be struck by its artifice.
But something was missing—a textual or visual layer that might have deepened the experience. I wasn’t entirely convinced the play had a deeper message beyond in a digital age, everything is recorded, and an affair leaves traces. Or perhaps our brains are so eager to construct a familiar narrative that we take Tamati’s dual performance at face value, filling in the gaps ourselves. After all, we only see the emails and receipts—are they enough to tell the full story?
And how might our biases shape that perspective? Chris and Jo’s names are gender-neutral—could there be a queer layer the observer (Chris’s wife) is missing from her vantage point?
Ultimately, From Another Woman is an absorbing watch. It’s impeccably crafted to induce a stomach-sinking sense of inevitability and make it impossible to look away. The audience cringes as professional boundaries blur and a casual relationship slips into something irrevocable. But beyond that, it leaves me wondering—what kind of story could be pieced together from my own emails and receipts?
From Another Woman will play Basement Theatre from 27 February–1 March.
