Island Girls: The Remix at the Maidment Studio

By FRANCIS TILL

The original of this play was an extraordinary gem. After a year's fine-tuning and expansion, the "remix" is larger, better and firmly establishes Teuila Blakely as one of New Zealand's best young playwrights.

The Island Players company is notoriously publicity shy - to the point of not even printing a programme for the performance - and relies on word of mouth for much of its audience.

In this case, that word of mouth has been good enough to pack the Maidment Studio even on weeknights during the second of the production's two-week run.

And small wonder. Directed by Oscar Kightley, who had a substantial hand in shaping the original script, this revision puts a cast of 10 enormously talented actors through a beautifully paced, structurally tight 90 minutes without missing a beat.

Almost without exception, the immensely confident cast is already well-known from television and other stage productions and includes Robbie Magasiva (The Strip), Rene Naufahu (Shortland Street, Matrix Reloaded), Mario Gaoa (Naked Samoans), Vela Manusaute (Brownies), Teuila Blakely herself, Anapela Polataivao, Tausili Mose, Elizabeth Skeen, Phil Brown and Tony Potter.

There is an exceptional level of play and laughter in this work. The play uses its European characters as farcical foils but the core of the piece, for all that it is suffused with humour, is a tragedy of classic dimensions. At the centre are Blakely's Leilani and Magasiva's Jordan, second-generation Islanders who fall spectacularly in love only to shatter on cultural reefs.

Leilani and Jordan are each surrounded by protective friends and family, and it is in those interactions that the play sounds its greatest thematic depths, unencumbered by stereotyping or convention, through a delightful series of vignettes.

But this is not only a work of ideas. Blakely and Magasiva are magnificent together on stage, projecting a charismatic chemistry that works on multiple levels, from the sensual to the violent. The despair they experience at the end is driven by an organic inevitability and leavened by a rueful sense of hope: an outcome that reaches well beyond the personal.