Madam Black

Evie struggles to come to terms with the funny and sometimes painful discrepancies between measured-time and time as she really experiences it. From the agonizing Morning After-Time to the merely annoying Snooze-Time. As Evie's life progresses her experience of time gets even more confusing. The significant events in her early life become more distant until she arrives at the Contradiction-Time of old age: the days seem to creep by , but oddly, Christmas comes around faster each year. It becomes clear that time is playing it's cruelest trick of all: it's running out.

‘Blue Smoke’ follows a rest-home caretaker, Joe, who is mistaken by an elderly resident, Beryl, for her for her lounge-singing ex-husband. Joe plays his doppelgänger in the hopes of swindling her, until he realises she’s broke and dying. When she’s finally taken into palliative care, he finishes off the story of his doppelgänger’s departure to comfort Beryl, and sings her ‘their’ song: NZ classic, Blue Smoke.