AK09 review: 'Te Karakia' at the Herald Theatre

If there's a genre that local playwrights - usually Maori - have made their own, it's high-tension family drama.

They deal with potentially deathly topics like cultural identity and land politics in a compelling way, calculated to leave no dry eye in the house.

Te Karakia - revamped since its premiere in Wellington last year - is a worthy addition to this canon from the reliably excellent Taki Rua Productions.

Playwright Albert Belz keeps the genre fresh by playing with its conventions: this self-assured play is ostensibly about a Pakeha-Maori romance, but for plot purposes it could almost be a mono-cultural Pakeha or Maori relationship, and anyway, it only serves as a catalyst for the real drama.

Apart from a subplot apparently suggesting that the free market and a bit of blackmail will lead to harmonious land sharing, Belz leaves discussion of race relations aside.

Instead he asks what happens when a God-fearing Nan (Donagh Rees) and her religion of 'structure, stricture and Scripture' denies her grandson what he needs.

Will said grandson, Matt (ably played by Michael Whalley), grow up to be emotionally stunted? Certainly he becomes an anonymous and possibly inhumane member of the Red Squad for the 1981 Springbok tour.

Meanwhile, his beguiling young neighbour Ranea (a radiant performance by Ngapaki Emery) joins the anti-tour protestors.

While the playwright's sympathies lie with the protestors, he doesn't demonise the police but - more interestingly - offers explanations for them.

Matt uses the uniform as an exoskeleton refuge to hide from the world after a crisis (revealed in flashbacks); his Maori colleague Phillip (a comfortably larrikin Karlos Drinkwater) just wants to impress the girls by being an 'alpha dog'.

A little more attention could be paid to period mannerisms and costume, and the play's coincidences and heavy parenting is the stuff of melodrama, but the bitterness of the man who tries to be an island rings true.

Dammit, they got me: I cried.