Return season of brilliant first play

Nga Manurere – the Flock

At TAPAC until May 22

A return season of a superb first play Nga Manurere, by a 27-year-old actor, has attracted tiny audiences in its TAPAC (the Auckland performing art centre) location at Western Springs College so far but is my pick for the production of the year in this city.

Here’s hoping more people will rush out and see this entertaining production before it ends. I was saddened at the end of the production on Saturday night when there was a plaintive appeal by the actors to “tell your friends about us.”

And here’s an attractor for the unconvinced – one of the stars is Rhys Castle-Hughes, the younger brother of film star Keisha, herself the costume designer for the production.

Renae Maihi has written a play that had (when I saw it on Saturday night) parents of teenagers laughing so hard they wept as they watched the desperate teenager of this production away from the city thrusting her cellphone up in all directions so she can stay in connect with her friends and to text. They roared with delight as they recognised their teenagers’ “whatever,” those insouciant sniffs and sighs and rolling of the eyes, those clothes …

And we recognised and laughed with and at all the other characters, the solo mother battling her way (rather too preachily – this part was played by the playwright – the programme notes she is herself a solo mum); the traditional uncle from the Far North who charms women but who has his own tale; the counselor who once ran away from home and gave her baby to her mother to be raised as a whanuau baby and now her mother has died has to take over the 16-year-old country-raised and deeply resentful boy (who is my father? Were you the town bike?”); the solo mother trying to keep a career as a lawyer running while missing time with her son; a youngster who had her child at 16 desperately trying to hang on to her child’s father as he backs away. All had wonderfully traced idiosyncracies not always represented in the text but seen in the acting teased out by director Rachel House. The production is a triumph for House as much as for Maihi.

Maihi is a wonderful observer; her characters’ remarks have a wry recognition of us as Kiwis (for example, a group of Maori women mourners remark that these days all Kiwi women wear black; it’s no longer just kuia).
But it is just not a comedy – it’s a redemptive tragedy, which asks and bravely tries to answer whether families should tell the truth.

Telling what the play decided would ruin the suspense for audiences to come – it’s heartrending – but a group of seven of us who saw it after a dinner party argued about it for an hour or two afterward, so interesting was its conclusion.

Maori but universal
It’s firmly rooted in New Zealand, with largely Maori characters. A fair amount of Maori is spoken throughout the play and used in such a way that two visiting American academics said they understood the language from the context. That was done most cleverly and also reveals how much Maori language pakeha people know these days. But this play is so universal, it could be translated it into any language and the dilemma would be the same. It is more about family – whanau – than it is about culture.

Interestingly, if this play had come out 20 to 30 years ago there would have been feminist and cultural issues fought over it. Baby boomers will certainly see it differently from Gen Y, I suspect.

The play twists; half of our party admitted we had deep suspicions about one character only to be surprised by the final revelation.

By itself, the play is substantial, though the coda was too short and limited – the playwright could add more to it in future productions.

The actors made a delightful ensemble. They were: Nicola Kawana, Renae Maihi, Lana Garland, Rhys Castle Hughes, Sera Henare, William Timothy Favis/Wiremu Timoti Te Waru Rewiri Ngapua.

The set and setting was at times perfect for the production but I was eventually extremely irritated by the director’s ploy with kitchen chairs. The play was ultimately a collection of tableaux. At the start of each one, to indicate passing of time and place, the characters moved the six white painted chairs around the set. At times this was done with humour but toward the end the chair hoisting interfered with the progress of the play. I must add that others in my group disagreed strongly with me on this.

At the start of the play when the chairs represented gravestones in a cemetery and a character mimed scraping off the mould, I was slightly appalled. This could have been handled with light rather less sacrilegiously by any culture’s terms. The set was rather too traditional – exit left and exit right the only options. Upstairs might have worked …

Nga Manurere – The Flock

CLOSES: Sunday 22 May 2010

TIMES: Tue – Wed 7pm, Thurs – Sat 8pm, Sun 4pm

Book online www.tapac.org.nz/ or phone 09 845 0295