AK03: Awhi Tapu at Regent Theatre, St James

By GREG DIXON

Never let it be said there's anything flash about New Zealand theatre.

As actor-directors Nathaniel Lees and Nancy Brunning light up in the Ponsonby warehouse-cum-rehearsal rooms of the Auckland Theatre Company, they snuggle into warm coats against the cold and position themselves beside a heater as old as the Ark.

The scene, if it were to be played, would be called Dickensian - and not just for the cold. This pair have been toiling like workhouse inmates over the past couple of months.

It's the lunch-break in rehearsals for The Songmaker's Chair, novelist Albert Wendt's first play, which debuts at this month's inaugural Auckland Festival, AK03.

But it's the other play the duo are bringing to AK03 that were here to talk about - Awhi Tapu, a work by young playwright Albert Belz.

Lees is directing both works and appearing in one, The Songmaker's Chair. With such a workload, he's had little time to reset Awhi Tapu, whose premiere he helmed earlier this year. So he and Brunning have formed a double directing act to get both to the stage during the Auckland Festival.

The play, produced by Taki Rua Productions and described by one critic as "yet another compelling experience" from the company, is story of a search for place and purpose.

Awhi Tapu (literal translation: "to hold sacred") is small town, a gateway to the Ureweras, a forestry town that's dying. The Government has said the trees will be saved, no more will be cut down. The town is starting to die.

"But in its dying, there are these four young people who remain and they have there own reasons for staying," Lees says.

"Some believe the whanau will return, others fear leaving because they know little of what lies outside the town. It's how the four cope and what they change that world into so that they can cope."

Auckland-based Belz, who has written for Te Maunga and Shortland Street, has said Awhi Tapu is about "the strength of unity, the safety of love, the last breath goodbye, faith in the unbelievable, belief in the unimaginable, and a mother holding her child".

It is also, he says, a story of four friends searching for a beacon to guide them through a timeless ocean of mist. That mist, of course, is the fog of the Ureweras.

"The Ureweras, that tribal area, the iwi, they are a group unto themselves," Lees says. "They come out of the hills, they do their stuff and they go back there. They call themselves the children of the mist because that's almost what happens to them."

The mist is metaphor for the situation of the play's characters. Their experience of outside things is not so much limited as seen through their history and isolation.

"They have their own way of thinking and talking and acting," Lees says.

Brunning says Belz' work is a young man's play.

"We haven't had that in Maori plays before. We've had lots of our young men write plays about the old days. But what Albert is concentrating on is the now: 'Where do we stand as young people in the community?' The play is about the pressure put on these young people to move.

"The play is asking, 'Who do we follow now all the old people have left?"'

All of which makes it sound rather grim. But Brunning says it ends on a hopeful note.

And Lees says there is much humour, as one character, who uses his redundancy money to buy Sky Digital, draws the others into a game of playing out movie characters in the real world.

"But the reality of what actually happens keeps catching up with them. So you're set up, you're laughing, and then you realise what's really happened.

"This is a play that comes up and bites you."

* From tonight until Thursday

Herald Feature: Auckland Festival AK03

Auckland Festival website