Kiwi actor Rawiri Paratene known for Whale Rider, Playschool and now, Hamlet on the world's stages. Photo / Supplied
Kiwi actor Rawiri Paratene known for Whale Rider, Playschool and now, Hamlet on the world's stages. Photo / Supplied
One of our most treasured actors has been on the road for more than a year with a Globe Theatre production of one of the planet’s most treasured plays, Hamlet. On the eve of the production’s visit here, Greg Dixon talks to Rawiri Paratene about how he came to be taking Shakespeare to the world.
In Cyprus, it was a Greco-Roman theatre in the ancient city of Kourion with the eternal Mediterranean as a backdrop. In the Czech Republic it was in a beautiful courtyard at Prague Castle, the official residence of the country's president. In Eritera it was the Cinema Roma, built by Italian fascists in the 1930s. In Merida in Mexico it was in the village square in front of the oldest Catholic cathedral in the mainland Americas and in Botswana it was in a cultural centre in Kasane, the small town where Elizabeth Taylor remarried Richard Burton back in 1975.
In Shakespeare's resonant metaphor, all the world is a stage. For Rawiri Paratene this has been quite literally true for a year, and will be for another as he plays on stages from Europe to the Americas to Africa to Asia to the Pacific.
When the veteran actor of local stage and screen briefly visits home at the end of the month for five performances of the Globe Theatre's production of Hamlet, he and the small international cast and crew of this world-conquering production of Shakespeare's most powerful tragedy will have travelled more than 150,000km and played the show in 102 countries, all in little over a year. By the time this grand, mad and wildly ambitious tour finishes at the Shakespeare's Globe in London next April, Paratene and his fellow players will have travelled more than 230,000km and - fingers crossed, touch wood - should have played their Hamlet in every country in the world.
"If I won the lottery, I'd go around the world," Paratene says by phone, from of all places, Namibia. "But that's what I'm doing now, I'm going around the world, getting paid, my accommodation is looked after and I'm working on this beautiful piece. I feel like I've actually won the lottery. Simple."
Taking Hamlet to the world is part of the Globe Theatre's "Globe To Globe" project. In the past this has meant theatre companies from all over the world (including a Maori one led by Paratene in 2013) travelling to London to perform - in their own language - one of Shakespeare's plays on the Globe's famous stage. However, to mark the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth on April 23, 2014, an even more ambitious theatrical adventure was conceived: a two-year global tour of Hamlet.
Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Globe and director of the production, says the central principle of the tour is that Shakespeare can speak to anyone, no matter where they are on Earth. "In 1608, only eight years after it was written, Hamlet was performed on a boat - the Red Dragon - off the coast of Yemen," Dromgoole says. "Just 10 years later it was being toured extensively all over Northern Europe. The spirit of touring, and of communicating stories to fresh ears, was always central to Shakespeare's work. We couldn't be happier to be extending that mission even further. By train, coach, plane and boat we aim to take this wonderful, iconic, multifarious play to as many fresh ears as we possibly can."
And they have, in so many places, come in their thousands to see the play in places great and small and filled with history. In Bitola in Macedonia, in a Roman amphitheatre in the ruins of a city built by Alexander the Great's father, Paratene and his fellow players performed for more than 2000 people. In Merida there were close to 5000 people. "We were like rock stars," he says, "They were hanging out of trees, they were hanging off balconies." In Rwanda the performance was, until power cuts forced the show outside, to have been held in a theatre where 1000 students were hacked to death during that country's genocide 20 years ago. And the day before Paratene and I talked, Hamlet's most famous lines - "to be or not to be" - had been heard by a small audience in a little cultural centre in Botswana.
"There were elephants roaming outside," says Paratene sounding elated through the weariness of a day spent travelling from there to Namibia. "It's been pretty damn fine. It's been a real honour."
Those words - "to be or not to be" - changed Paratene's life. In one of those gratifying, mystifying, happy accidents of life it is the very play he's helping take to every country in the world that is also the play that set him on the path to sitting in a hotel room in Namibia talking to me about taking Hamlet around the globe.
Rawiri in Macedonia. Photo / Holly Blaxill
His bursting CV details 40 years of playing and writing for the theatre, starring in some of our most beloved films, including Whale Rider and Footroot Flats: The Dog's Tale, and writing and performing in two dozen (at least) television dramas, comedies and telefeatures. He has even been a Playschool presenter. He has won awards and a writing scholarship. He has been a deputy chairman of the New Zealand Film Commission. The 61-year-old is also a trustee on the South Pacific Whale Research Consortium, and of Te Paepae Ataata, which funds the development of Maori cinema. None of this might have been if he hadn't, as a Hillary College student back in the late 60s, gone with the rest of his class to a matinee at the Mercury Theatre in downtown Auckland.
"My objective was to flirt with the girls from St Dominic's - and I achieved this loudly. When we arrived in the auditorium of the Mercury there was no curtain so I thought we were in some form of a holding pen before we went into the theatre. So I was just being a rowdy person, joyous at missing out on geography and mathematics. Then the lights changed, this mist start coming and the ghost appeared on the battlements and I was absolutely mesmerised; I forgot about the girls from St Dominic's.
"I walked out of that theatre and I knew the power of performing arts and I said to my teacher, 'I want to do that'."
It wasn't simply that he was mesmerised by the performance. There were other things at play, too. Born in the Hokianga of Ngapuhi descent, Paratene moved with his parents to South Auckland, to Otara, as the area was being thrown together by a careless government in the 60s.
"What I saw on stage [in Hamlet] was a young man grappling with elders he had no respect for, grappling with the powers-that-be that are, in his mind, corrupt. I was growing up in a community that had not been well looked-after by the powers that be. And the people that were most affected by that idiocy in terms of planning were us, were the young ones, because we had nothing. There was not a library, there was not a gymnasium, there was nothing. The Government took our parents into those areas as cheap labour and didn't provide anything. And so the result was, by the late 60s, gang problems and crap. And I knew this - and the character that was on the stage, that was created by a person who lived 400 years before me on the other side of the globe, talked to me directly."
Hamlet poster in Asmara, Eritrea. Photo / Helena Miscioscia
His mind was set. He approached the Mercury's then director, Tony Richardson. He wanted to leave school. He wanted to be on stage. He was just 15. Richardson told him to finish college, go to Toi Whakaari, the New Zealand Drama School, and they'd see. Richardson kept his word. Paratene finished school, graduated from Toi Whakaari in 1972 - the first Maori to do so - and Richardson chose him to join the company as an apprentice player, the only NZDS graduate to be taken by Mercury that year. Soon enough, in 1974, the kid that had been so moved by Hamlet in the Mercury's stalls was on its stage playing Edgar in King Lear. His life's work had begun.
The plan went something like this: he would work for 10 years as an actor, then he'd become a writer. "The writing came because I walked out of the Mercury Theatre after I saw Hamlet [as a kid] and it was the writer that came through. I knew that this was the work of a writer. So that's where the idea of writing came. The door that I chose to learn the craft was the actor's door. I could have chosen a different door, I suppose. But I figured if I want to understand how to write, then by acting I can learn how to do it."
As it turned out, this is exactly what happened. He would indeed go on to write for the theatre and radio, and write drama and comedy for television including co-writing, with Ian Mune, Dead Certs, a one-off Sunday night drama which he also starred in; the role won him his first acting award in 1996. In fact, a decade or so after his debut on stage in Mercury Lane, Paratene won the University of Otago's Robert Burns Fellowship, a year-long writing residency in Dunedin.
The play in Prague, Czech Republic. Photo / Supplied
However, his career since debuting at the Mercury has been - on stage and screen and behind them - one of the most diverse of any local actor. Partly this has come from his desire to tell stories. Partly this has been because he was, eventually, a father of six (from two marriages; he's now a grandfather of 15) who was working to feed a large family.
He was not long out of Toi Whakaari when he realised the audience he wanted to play to - Maori - were watching TV, not theatre. So in 1977 he began acting for television, starring in the first local sitcom Joe and Koro, an Odd Couple-style show about two flatmates, one a Pom, the other a Maori kid (played by Paratene wearing an impressive afro) who works in a fish and chip shop. He also got a bit part in the ground-breaking drama The Governor during the filming of which the director apparently had to ask him to "reign in" his performance - he was playing a corpse at the time.
For many New Zealanders, he's probably best remembered as Koro, the stern, unbending grandfather of Keisha Castle-Hughes' Paikea in the worldwide hit, Whale Rider.
However, his screen work, big and small, has gone from playing a gang member in Once Were Warriors sequel What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted? to documentary-making, to writing and performing in comedies Laughinz and Issues in the 90s, to voicing the character Rangi in the animated film version of Footrot Flats. He continues to make films, with his most recent, 2009's Insatiable Moon, winning him another acting gong.
Has he become the actor that that kid at the Mercury wanted to be, I ask. "Ha! My idea of acting back then was Paul Newman." He laughs again. "I'd love to become Paul Newman, he was a great actor. You see the stuff he did ... So no! No, I've never been a sex symbol and don't consider I have the mastery of camera, certainly, that Newman had. So not yet! Working at it! It's not too late to be a sex symbol, mate!"
Well no. He's joking of course, but his career has been one of unexpected directions, like his five years on Playschool. "I was 10 years in to my career and I was doing Playschool. I still get recognised from Playschool, doesn't matter what I do.
The reason [I took it on] was simply because it gave me enough money to support my family [of three children] so I could do what I really wanted to do which was to help run [the Fortune Theatre in Dunedin]."
Between and around and after all these things, he's done good and worthy things too, including teaching at Toi Whakaari and deputy chairing the Film Commission. He's sought new experiences too: his association with the Globe began with an acting fellowship in 2007.
Rawiri Paratene as Hamlet in Reykjavik. Photo / Hordur Sveinsson
However, his most rewarding venture was a play called Children of the Sea, a work that started as a series of workshops for Sri Lankan kids affected by their country's civil war and the 2004 tsunami. This play would win four awards at the 2005 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
"I never had a real plan," he says. "The best plan I had was right at the beginning. Ever since then I've thrown plans away ... 18 months ago I didn't know I was going to be doing this. I don't what I'm going to be doing after this ... "
It's as Polonius, one of the two major roles Paratene has in Hamlet, says in Act 1: "This above all: to thine own self be true ... "
The road has had its pleasures. Travelling from Zambia to Botswana, for instance, the Globe To Globe party stopped at the Victoria Falls. "It doesn't matter how many images you see of these places like the Victoria Falls," Paratene says, "It blows you away. So that was that day. The next day, which was a day off, we were on safari. We saw impala, buffalo, hippos, elephants galore, lions ... "
But even for a good and eager traveller, the road has its sorrows. Last year, he spent his first Christmas outside New Zealand. And then there was Kiev.
"It was early on in the Hamlet tour and I was sooo homesick. I missed the grandkids, I missed my darling wife. I get to stages where - and this is not just on this gig, but on so many gigs - where my body aches with loneliness. We were in Kiev and the whole company were going out for dinner and the restaurant had good raps and we'd just performed. It was the night before the presidential elections and the guy who is president [of the Ukraine] was there, the famous boxer Klitschko, who became Mayor of Kiev the next day, was there. So there was a buzz. But I was just so lonely. I went back to my hotel room, I ordered chicken kiev and a bottle of wine and I spent the night being lonely having a dinner and drinking by myself and putting on some music and dancing because I was too homesick to spend time with my colleagues.
"So that's how I cope. I just pull myself away from the company when stuff is going on, and they have got used to that. We all have our different ways."
Fortunately over the last year there's been the constant presence of Hamlet; the play is the thing, after all. And Paratene says it has the meat on its bones to sustain the company for its two-year journey. The audiences - except in a few countries where dodgy governments have "rigged" them - have delighted them too.
"Yesterday we had a very young audience, teenagers, and they were delightful," he says. "We had a meet and greet with them afterwards and our hosts had provided some entertainment for us. So some dancers came and performed their cultural dances for us. I ended up sitting by this young boy, I don't know how old he was, 12-13, and he was just blown away.
"I was playing Claudius yesterday. He sat there and after the dancers had finished, he looked at me and said 'I just loved this, I loved it, I loved it ...'
He just kept on saying it. He said 'even though you were a bad man, I loved seeing you'. He was addressing me as the King, as Claudius. The magic had happened. I understood exactly what he said, even though I was portraying a bad man, the story had come through to him and just grabbed him. It was fantastic."
