Island Girls at the Maidment Studio

By FRANCIS TILL

This stunning little play is by Oscar Kightley and Teuila Blakely, who also take two of the key roles. Kightley has the Greek-charged role of Conscience 2 and Blakely has the female lead, Leilani.

Although the play traces the life of Leilani, Kightley and his alter-ego, Mario Goa (Conscience 1), steal much of the show with their immensely revealing broadside takes on what exactly the central male character (Jordan, portrayed magnificently by Pua Magasiva) should do after meeting Leilani and falling in love with her immediately.

The tragically flawed Jordan - caught between two worlds and fitting well in neither - is a poster for the islands as outsiders see them: full of impossibly beautiful, completely physical men.

Leilani is also a caricature in a way. Beautiful, of course, she is a perfect Kiwi version of the ultimate Island Girl, but she is profoundly tormented, a victim of both her self-erasing love and her hope for better things.

Underneath it all is an unvarnished window that opens into the real, deeply conflicted world of New Zealand's Samoan women and their suddenly fragile men, all trying to adjust to their new home without losing everything that went before, and the ruinous power of the sometimes invincible old over the fragile new.

Everywhere the characters are caught between the way things used to be and the way they could and should be. And they fail, falling into the fathomless spaces between in spite of best intentions because the very thing that gives them the ability to win at musket range robs them of victory in other, larger ways.

There are many points of laughter in the play - in fact the audience I sat with could not stop laughing - but the work is much more than a take on Samoan life in New Zealand.

It is funny, but the perfect, in fact, exquisite and hopeless end, makes it clear that if you thought this was a comedy, you weren't watching.