Bittersweet: Unwrapping Cadbury’s

Booking essential.

After a successful season earlier this year at Toitū, Bittersweet: Unwrapping Cadbury’s – women share their work stories returns for a limited run as part of the Ōtepoti Dunedin Heritage Festival.

Bittersweet is a celebration of the day-to-day life of one of Dunedin's iconic industries.

This engaging and revealing short piece of documentary theatre shares the stories of seven Cadbury’s women workers - of life in the factory, and what it brought to the city, and the world.

The women are just some of thousands of workers over the years. Theirs are the everyday stories behind the colourful promotion of our favourite chocolate treats, produced in their millions at the factory for nearly 150 years. And as with most readily available items, we don’t often think of how they are made.

Production in this iconic piece of Dunedin history has ceased. Its workers have left, its machines long-gone, the very buildings are now disappearing. Very soon, stories – memories – will be the only things that remain of Cadbury Dunedin.

In performance, the workers' stories are vividly related in a very unusual way. With the audio of interviews with the workers playing in their ears, the actors not only repeat their original words as they are spoken, but replicate inflections, intonation, and movement.

Bittersweet acknowledges the work of all Cadbury’s workers, and aims to make the ordinary extraordinary, even if just for a short time.