Herald Theatre
Review: Susan Budd
Woman Far Walking is a stunning piece of theatre in which text, performances and design are beautifully integrated. Writer Witi Ihimaera blends the personal and the political in the chronicle of one woman's life that spans the history of our country since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.
Tiri Mahana was born on February 6, 1840, and is named for the tiriti that she bitterly describes as a fraud. In a powerful opening speech, she relates the coming of the Pakeha, "hairy goblins," and laments her status as a freak and aberration who has outlived all she loves. She rails and wails, comedy and tragedy alternating in a fantastic aria.
Tiri is two women: the ancient, bent with the weight of history, and a quirky elf, the child who lives still and questions every memory, all that seems solidly rooted in time.
Rachel House is superb as the old woman, strong despite her years of suffering, her face a tragic mask that yet splits into a wide grin, her voice resonant and expressive.
Rima Te Wiata is mercurial, placing her darts deftly to sting the old woman into admission of the truths underlying the solidity of historical fact.
She is the child Tiri desperately longing for her mother while working as cook and firekeeper to weavers in an isolated valley, a minstrel husband, a staunch young woman protesting against the 1981 Springbok tour. And she plays them all with fierce intensity, integrity and wit.
The actors are perfectly attuned, playing together with rare sensitivity and power.
Despite Ihimaera's powerfully metaphorical writing, the strength of the performances and director Cathy Downes' fluidly choreographed scenes, the first act is bogged down in battles of the New Zealand Wars. I wanted more magic, less realism. But in the second act the play takes wing, plunging through 20th-century catastrophes: the First World War and the epidemic that followed it, French nuclear tests, the despoliation of Tiri's valley to mine ironsand for Japan.
Why, after all that, would she want a birthday telegram from the Queen?
<i>Performance:</i> Woman Far Walking
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