I Didn’t Invite You Here to Lecture Me

I Didn’t Invite You Here To Lecture Me was a comedy show at Q Theatre in May. The show was created from hundreds of lines noted down during Amy Mansfield’s seven years at the University of Auckland. With a caveat that any resemblance to real people is coincidental. 

Mika Austin performed eight different characters over the course of the hour-long “lecture”, switching seamlessly back and forth between each character. This was cleverly done with both the writing, voice, accents and small costume elements, as little as moving her glasses up from halfway down his nose.

There was the slightly grumpy Law lecturer who would look over his glasses sitting halfway down his nose and forgot the handouts, again. There were some potentially questionable lines calling the plaintiff “a bit of a turd”, and calling the guy a tosser, “he should’ve been charged for stupidity.” 

There was the Shakespeare lecturer who always sounded just a little bit worried. And a little bit confused about the number of students treating the lectures as optional. Before the days of recorded lectures.

Anglo-Irish Literature lecturer often coming back to “They were screwed once and they’ll be screwed again.” I’m not convinced this was in the same context each time.

Music lecturer, presumably teaching a choir, some guy called Jeremy getting called on continuously. 

The mildly over enthusiastic Linguistics lecturer getting very excited about verbs, as well as concluding, “we need more language to put down men”. There was some great audience interaction on the importance of intonation with the phrase “I love your mother’s cooking.”

We had the German lecturer contemplating how to burn a library and referring to a certain period of German history as a cautionary tale against going with the flow.

Policy lecturer, “I don’t think Nicola knows what feminism is, or Judith.”

I would be lying if I said I had properly noticed the education lecturer. I don’t know if I should be admitting to this, given I’m in the process of applying to teacher training. Was there some unhinged shit that went straight over my head? And what does that say about me?

I do wonder how many of these statements would still be said if lectures had been recorded then, but then I remember the weird shit my own lecturers have said the last three and half years. Not nearly as unhinged as my high school physics teacher though.

The show carried themes across characters, the policy lecturer introduced terrorist acts. Then shifted to the lawyer, where he called the students' assignments terrorist acts. I do wonder whether he’d get away with saying that these days. You could certainly see the themes coming through from the writer’s time in a Bachelor of Arts with a Bachelor of Law.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a lecture without the lecturer noticing the time and quickly finishing with, We’re out of time, that’s all for today.