The Untold Tales of Maui at The SiLo

By FRANCIS TILL

South Park meets Maori legends on stage and the audience comes out the winner in this fast paced, politically incorrect, rough hewn and often convulsively funny two-hour work from Humourbeasts Taika Cohen and Jemaine Clement. It is yet another successful Taki Rua production.

Maui, a Maori demigod and Polynesia's most famous navigator, is mostly known for having fished up the North Island (Te Ika a Maui) from his canoe (the South Island) using his grandmother's jawbone as a hook.

Here, Maui is invoked by a fantastically dwarfed, beach-dwelling grandmother with a penchant for deadpan irony (Clement), who tells the "untold tales" as part of an absurdist ploy to get her Michael Jackson look-alike teenage grandson (Cohen) back on the straight and narrow.

Clement and Cohen are backed in the enactment of Maui's exotic and befuddled adventures by a variety of puppets, the most amazing of which are papier-mache heads used to represent most of Maui's four mortal brothers.

Set in the 1980s, the play uses just about every trick in the performance comedy kitbag. Directed by Andrew Foster with the help of script adviser Oscar Kightley, Untold Tales is utterly devoid of reverence, to overwhelmingly positive effect.

Clement and Cohen are able to turn even performance stumbles to grist for the comic mill as they skip through a rambling text that leaves no taonga unturned.

Untold Tales is in Auckland after performances at the Court in Christchurch and Circa in Wellington.

Next stop will be the Taupo Festival in February and then on to the NZ International Festival of the Arts in Wellington, where it should do well.

Wellington-based Taki Rua - Maori for "to go in twos" - has been around since 1997 and is earning national recognition for its productions. It won the NZ Listener 2002 Theatre Awards for Witi Ihimaera's Woman Far Walking, which also picked up the Chapman Tripp Outstanding Performance Award for Rachel House in 2000.

As a comedy, Untold Tales doesn't compare with the sterner stuff the company is increasingly famous for, but it is the funniest thing I've seen all year.