1st August 2025
Collaborate Management is proud to celebrate the success of Alice Pearce in A Rich Man, the powerful new play from celebrated playwright and director Sam Brooks. Currently running at the Old Folks Association in Auckland, the show has stunned opening night audiences and is already being described as “brutal, intelligent, and necessary.”
Set in a once-stately home where a powerful man lies dying upstairs, four younger men drink, shift uneasily, and reckon with their proximity to something unspoken and unclean. Beneath the flowing wine and tense silences lies a deeper rot, one tied to power, memory, and the violence of inaction.
Alice Pearce delivers what critics are calling a “quietly commanding and emotionally precise” performance. Her comic instincts cut through with a cool detachment, and her presence onstage is magnetic. Every moment lands with weight, offering the production a razor-sharp tension that holds the room. The stillness she brings is unnerving, and unforgettable. Pearce’s performance doesn’t just support the ensemble—it defines the production’s moral and emotional edge.
The rest of the cast—Mark Chayanat Whittet, Dan Cockerill, Sean Rivera, and Max Crean—offer textured, tightly wound portrayals of young men caught in a web of guilt, denial and performance. Their shifting dynamics reflect a culture of silence where bravado masks shame and vulnerability hides behind aggression.
Sheena Irving, as the housekeeper, brings grit and grit-laced humour to the stage—nursing drinks and perhaps darker truths. Her role hints at complicity layered with survival.
Brooks’s writing doesn’t flinch. Taut, darkly funny and heavy with implication, A Rich Man is a brutal takedown of what happens when we refuse to speak up; when we choose comfort over confrontation. Jennifer Lal’s haunting design and Brooks’s precise direction set the stage for theatre that forces its audience to stay in the room and really look.
Notably, no character in the play is named. This stark absence strips away individual identity and instead casts the characters as archetypes in a wider system of abuse and neglect. The result is unsettling, timely, and deeply human.
For New Zealand actors, directors, and casting professionals, A Rich Man represents everything strong, independent theatre should be. For audiences, it's a rare opportunity to see a production that doesn’t offer resolution—only reflection.
And for us at Collaborate Management, it’s a moment of pride. Alice Pearce continues to show what being an exciting talent is in the current landscape.
© 2025 Collaborate NZ
