Three ill-equipped wardens keep watch over a makeshift community (that’s you, the audience) who must learn to work together. When night falls — who do you trust?
A gripping, communal, and surprisingly funny descent into collective paranoia, Werewolf takes the familiar shape of an emergency lockdown and twists it into something far stranger. What begins as a lightly satirical nod to the rituals we all learned during the COVID years becomes an increasingly tense, atmospheric, and deeply social experience. What we experience is a show that thrives on audience energy without ever forcing anyone into the spotlight, and the result is a night that feels less like watching theatre and more like being swept into a shared event.
The experience starts before anything “begins”. Being scanned into the auditorium carries a different weight now, and passing through a security portal sets the tone. Inside, the Loft has been transformed into a containment unit lined with silver sheeting. Brightly lit seats face forward in tight formation, each with a Public Information Booklet waiting like a government-issued survival kit. Cargo boxes stamped with ambiguous logos reinforce the sense of an organised, entity involved. A single monitor shows a murky darkness beyond the safehouse walls, hinting at whatever threat lurks outside.
Once the final person enters, the doors seal. The wardens take charge. They are warm, competent, and reassuring at first, with a knack for crowd management and a veneer of calm authority. Stella Reid, Hannah Kelly, and Joel Baxendale play versions of themselves, which adds a playful meta-layer. They feel like the kind of people you’d want in charge during a crisis. But as the minutes tick by, cracks appear. Their confidence wavers. Their unity fractures. The safehouse begins to feel less safe.
The premise is simple: a new outbreak has swept the country, and we must isolate for seven days. The word “werewolf” is never used, replaced instead with the more clinical “lycanthropy”, which somehow makes it worse. The threat is both absurd and unsettling, and the show leans into that tension.
One of the show’s strengths is how it handles audience involvement. Every seat has a small card outlining a role, and eight audience members are quietly deputised as monitors for wellbeing, safety, time, and other categories. But the structure is gentle. You can speak up or stay silent. You can follow your booklet to the letter or simply observe. The show never demands performance; it invites it.
This low-pressure approach creates a space where people feel comfortable contributing. Some audience members become enthusiastic collaborators, especially the group in tin foil hats convinced that 5G is to blame. Others remain quiet but attentive, feeding the atmosphere with their presence. The wardens are skilled improvisers, responding to interruptions, weaving audience comments into the narrative, and maintaining a delicate balance between humour and dread.
The social aspect is central. You share snippets from your booklet with your neighbours. You compare notes. You try to decide what’s real and what’s rumour. The show becomes a living network of whispered theories and half-truths. It’s a clever reflection of the misinformation cycles we all lived through, and it lands with a mix of recognition and unease.
The production design is minimal but potent. The silver sheeting creates a claustrophobic bunker. The forward-facing seating arrangement means the threats can move around unseen in the dark. Lighting shifts signal day and night, and the sound design fills the space with eerie ambience, distant howls, and the unsettling quiet of a world gone wrong.
The periods of complete darkness are the show’s most memorable feature. When the lights cut out, the room becomes a void. You can’t see the person in front of you. You can’t tell if someone is moving. The violin score slices through the silence, and you find yourself straining to hear footsteps or breathing. The tension builds slowly, then snaps with sudden flashes of light and bursts of sound that send jolts through the audience.
On some nights, a grainy infrared feed monitors the door outside the safehouse. Watching the screen becomes its own kind of suspense. Is something moving? Is the threat approaching? The ambiguity is delicious. These sensory elements are used sparingly but effectively. They never overwhelm the experience; they heighten it. The darkness becomes a character in its own right.
Despite the tension, the show is genuinely funny. The wardens deliver dry one-liners, awkward pep talks, and bureaucratic jargon with impeccable timing. The karaoke wellness session is a highlight, a moment of absurd levity that feels both ridiculous and strangely comforting. The humour doesn’t undercut the horror; it makes the darker moments hit harder.
This blend of tones mirrors the emotional whiplash of real crises. One moment you’re laughing at a silly pun, the next you’re questioning whether the person next to you might be infected. The show understands that fear and comedy often sit side by side, and it uses that interplay to keep the audience off balance.
What makes Werewolf memorable is how it transforms a room full of strangers into a temporary community. You enter as individuals and leave as a group who have weathered something together. People linger afterwards, comparing theories, debating what was staged and what was improvised, recounting the moments that made them jump or laugh or doubt their neighbours.
The show taps into something deeply human: our instinct to band together in uncertainty, our susceptibility to suspicion, and our desire to make sense of chaos. It echoes the shared trauma of lockdown without feeling exploitative. Instead, it reframes that experience through a playful, theatrical lens.
The content warnings are well-earned. There are loud noises, flashing lights, and long stretches of darkness. The show is designed to unsettle. But it’s also designed to welcome. Whether you’re a game-lover eager to participate or someone who prefers to sit quietly and observe, the structure accommodates you.
Werewolf is a sharp, inventive piece of interactive theatre that understands the power of collective imagination. It uses simple tools to create rich tension, and it trusts its audience to help shape the experience. The result is a night that feels alive, unpredictable, and strangely cathartic. It’s horror-comedy with heart, a social experiment wrapped in a thriller, and a reminder of how quickly a room can shift from safety to suspicion.
If you enjoy theatre that blurs the line between spectator and participant, or if you’re drawn to stories that play with fear and humour in equal measure, this is a show worth seeking out. It’s not just something you watch. It’s something you live through.
Performances of Werewolf run from March 5-8 at Auckland's Loft, Q Theatre.
For show information & tickets head to Auckland Arts Festival
For show information & tickets head to Auckland Arts Festival