Before We Slip North Island Tour

Before We Slip Beneath the Sea
An Immersive theatrical experience, brought to you by Red Scare Theatre Company.

After a hugely successful and sold out production in Pōneke in 2024, Red Scare Theatre Company is bringing this award-winning script about community in the face of climate change to new audiences around the North Island in 2025.

On a small island off Wellington’s north coast, the local community have gathered for the last time in the wake of an impending evacuation due to rising sea levels. When one community member decides to take a stand against the evacuation, the community is divided, long-buried tensions come to the fore, and everyone must decide how to cope with change, loss and forces far greater than themselves.

“A hauntingly beautiful portrayal of human relationships. It’s a fantastic immersive experience that plunges you into the sea of its drama, and you don’t even really want to come up for air.” 
Elliot Lam, Wellyott

“Red Scare’s Before We Slip Beneath the Sea has proven to be an absorbing and salutary experience.”
John Smythe, Theatreview

Winner of Best Play by a Woman Playwright and overall Runner-Up at the 2024 Adam NZ Play Awards.
 

Project Lead: Cassandra Tse (Writer/Director)

Cassandra is a playwright, director, performer, and the artistic director of Red Scare Theatre Company. She has been shortlisted twice for the Adam NZ Play Award – in 2023 for New Gold Mountain Woman, and 2024 for Before We Slip Beneath the Sea, which won overall Runner-Up and Best Play by a Woman Playwright. Her play Long Ago, Long Ago won Playmarket's Playwrights B4 25 award in 2015, and her musicals Right Dishonourable and M'Lady were both shortlisted for the same award in 2013 and 2017 respectively. Her play Under was commended for the Playwrights Association of New Zealand Long Play Award in 2017. In 2020, she received the New Zealand Society of Authors Auckland Museum Research Grant & Residency, which allowed her to research and write New Gold Mountain Woman from the Michael King Writers' Centre. In addition to her work for the theatre, she also wrote and starred in the five part audio drama Apocalypse Songs in 2020, and has written several short plays for young people published by School Journal.

In addition to directing many of her own works, Cassandra has directed the premieres of a number of new NZ plays, including Homemade Takeaways (2022) and Four Nights in the Green Barrow Pub (2019). She has also directed the NZ premieres of several international plays, including Single Asian Female (2021), The Aliens (2019), A New Brain (2017) and Yellow Face (2017).

CAST

Billie Deganutti, Charlie Potter, Craig Geenty, Hannah McKenzie Doornebosch, Helen Jones, Megan Connolly, Ralph Johnson.

ADDITIONAL CREW

Production Design: Lucas Neal

Stage Management: Lauren Ford-Jones

Publicity: Jamie Cain

Before We Slip Beneath The Sea is confirmed to tour to five locations:

• Auckland / Tāmaki Makaurau
• Hamilton / Kirikiriroa
• Rotorua
• Napier / Ahuriri
• Palmerston North / Te Papaioea

The tour takes place over thirteen days from 5-12 July, performing in cities either twice (Auckland, Hamilton) or for a single show (Rotorua, Napier and Palmerston North). 

Touring is an expensive undertaking and requires a great deal of costs involved. These include but are not limited to:

• Accommodation
• Venue hire
• Per diems for cast and crew
• Travel costs/petrol
• Marketing materials
• Consumables (we bake food every show!)

In order to allow audiences to move freely about the space, tickets are strictly limited to 40 audience members per performance. As such, we need the support of Boosted to cover essential touring costs and ensure our artists receive fair compensation during the tour.

Our premiere production in 2024 received funding from Wellington City Council which was instrumental in allowing the production to be realised in its full capacity. We have been unable to secure similar funding for the 2025 tour, so your donation would be instrumental in ensuring this tour is able to happen.

WHAT IS IMMERSIVE THEATRE?

Before We Slip the Sea is an Immersive theatre production that takes place in a community hall. Audience members are free to roam throughout the hall, encountering many different concurrent scenes and picking which narrative thread to follow. Audience members can choose whether to interact with the characters or eavesdrop on their conversations, and can join in on a final vote on the future of the community.

The play was developed as part of Cassandra Tse’s PhD in Immersive theatre. Despite exploding in popularity abroad, this form remains rare in New Zealand, especially outside of the large city centres; true Immersive theatre, in which audiences and performers share the same space, is even rarer. We are excited to be able to bring Before We Slip Beneath the Sea on tour to share the experience of free-roaming Immersive with audiences around Te Ika-a-Māui.

WELCOME TO EGLANTYNE

The play takes place on a fictional island in Wellington’s Ohariu Bay named Eglantyne. After being beset by storms, and with the coastline shrinking due to rising sea levels, the city council has ordered that the island be evacuated. Before We Slip Beneath the Sea explores the fractures that arise within a community when facing a seemingly insurmountable problem and how individuals react, both personally and politically, in order to preserve the lives that they’ve led. While some people think of the evacuation as an opportunity to make needed changes in their lives, others resist the council’s ruling. Their decisions, driven by principle, grief, or anger, threaten to splinter their relationships and the community itself. 

This show uses the real threat of climate change as a catalyst to tell human stories. By telling this story through an Immersive form, we hope that audience members feel like part of the community, not just outsiders looking in.

Before We Slip Beneath The Sea brings a vital conversation to audiences in a manner that places people at the forefront of the issue. Instead of just hearing about the impact of climate change, we invite you to become part of a community for a night; to celebrate, mourn and fight for your home. We hope that this engagement with the production emboldens audiences to consider the true impact of climate change on our world and feel more empowered to push for strategies to address it. 

Immersive theatre is a resource-intensive theatre form. Multiple concurrent scenes means that an hour-long show may contain three or four hours of material, all of which must be rehearsed; small audience numbers are a must in order to allow the audience members to move freely through the space. Despite these difficulties, we want to share Before We Slip Beneath the Sea with the rest of Aotearoa, and we need your help to make this tour a reality. We are excited to get the chance to share this work with Te Ika-a-Māui, especially centres that have not had many experiences of Immersive theatre before.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and please consider donating and sharing with your networks to help us reach our target.