Naked Samoans Go Home at the Herald Theatre

By FRANCIS TILL

Go Home is the fifth Naked Samoans production and by far the most complete as theatre. What makes that especially remarkable is that none of the fun has gone as payback.

For openers, we are given a family of six brothers and a very hot Samoan island from which New Zealand assumes mythical stature as a destination. The streets of Mangere are paved with gold, after all, and it's blessedly cold.

One of the brothers, Sione (Robbie Magasiva), is offered a tryout with the Ponsonby rugby club and heads off with much wailing in his wake ("Take me with you, don't go") from the other five, but particularly from the youngest brother, Laho (Jerome Leota), who is the stammering runt of the litter and the constant victim of much brotherly bashing.

Sione is Laho's special protector and much of what follows in the second act works because we come quickly in the first to see the importance of that rich bond.

The action swirls through a complex array of circumstances, all of which provide high-octane fodder for the razor-winged flights of comedy (and physical mayhem) that consistently pack the houses for Naked Samoan productions. Race and social disequilibrium are special targets, but these productions are minefields of great wit, with explosions going off constantly, often unexpectedly.

Together, these plays are as much facets on a gem as they are brilliantly illuminated windows into a series of worlds unfamiliar to palagi (white European) audiences. Individually, they are constructed to absorb rather than exclude, in spite of their specificity, telling universal stories inside alluringly unique textual skins.

For all that, this is, first, comedy, and no one does it better than the Naked Samoans. It is our good luck that there's more: a journey, and a tragedy, that gets full marks. On the performance side, Oscar Kightley's Commando, Shimpal Lelisi's Boogie Wonderland, Mario Gaoa's Sperm, and Dave Fane's "lesbian" fa'afine Caesarean are wonderfully evolved and completely realised, as is Leota's Laho. Robbie Magasiva, though, shines like a nova among stars in his central role as the doomed Sione.