Review: The Mooncake and the Kumara

The Mooncake and the Kumara

Loft, Q Theatre, Queen St

Until Tuesday

As much as I enjoyed this play and production, I don’t think this is the final version: it could yet be turned into an extraordinary play that could have great success on the global stage.

As it was, it was mostly delightful, funny and moving and certainly marvellously acted, with a good set and well-directed by KatieWolfe.

I didn’t read the programme beforehand because I didn’t have time so it was only later that I realised the best actor of the night, Charles Chan, playing an old Chinese market gardener (switching from Cantonese to English and back again as the part required) was an old NBR colleague and former subeditor, now retired to become an actor. Playing Choi, Charles was by turns severe, impish, profound and grumpy. I loved his take on martial arts-style movements.

The play is loosely based on the family history of writer Mei-Lin Te Puea Hansen. Her grandparents met nearly 90 years ago in a market garden and a romance with attendant comedy, tragedy and gritty reality grew from there. Originally, the play was a 10-minute piece, co-written with the writer’s cousin Kiel McNaughton, and won Best Drama at Short+Sweet 2009.

I particularly enjoyed the use of Cantonese and Maori  in  between the English – it was skilfully spoken and acted, so the meanings were clear. I loved the myths told by the young Chinese woman (if you see it, you will understand why I haven’t named her part (played by Chye-Ling Huang very sweetly) – it’s a spoiler) and the Maori cultural references too.

Yoson An as Yee, the Chinese son, and Awhina-Rose Henare Ashby as Elsie, the young wahine, built the growing relationship well and the way the plot told the story was both clever and meaningful. Waimihi Hotere as Elsie’s mother, a role not unlike that of Bloody Mary in the film South Pacific, was cheeky and, later, desperately sad.

The tale follows the life of the land-dispossessed Maori of the late 19^th, early 20^th century trying to adapt to the pakeha world and Chinese men, here first in the goldmines and later as market gardeners, sending remittance money back to China. They had desperate lives, not allowed to bring out their wives for fear they would breed, forced to pay a race-based poll tax, and they were heartily despised by the pakeha. It is notable that it took till 2002 before New Zealand apologised to its Chiense community for that.

This all added up to a good play. But it could have been even better and needs further development.

The third strand in the play is about the pakeha who owns the plots of land the market gardeners are slowly paying off and the Maori women are renting, who introduces the two families. Rodger Finlayson, played by Kip Chapman, is an incomplete character, vividly portrayed by Chapman nevertheless, but given frustratingly vague qualities. We learn he is lonely, that his wife and son have died and that he, like the Chinese writing home to their wives, writes to his parents back “home” but he is the straw man of the production, there to be despised. More work on this character’s motivation and history would round out the play (and explain his actions at the end of the play).