Two Days in Dream at the Herald Theatre

By FRANCIS TILL

Playwright (and Naked Samoan) Mario Gaoa's first major work for the stage, Two Days in Dream, is an extraordinary hour of theatre, showing well-seasoned maturity and depth.

It is a Samoan play, yes, but in the way Charles Goldie is a New Zealand painter: the range of the story and the craft in its presentation forge the ethnicity of the play into a lens that reveals and illuminates a core human experience.

It's often said that in the finest art, the universal is exposed by the perfectly defined particular, and Two Days is a particularly savoury proof of that pudding.

What a shame, then, that it has such a limited run (it ends tomorrow night).

Although it will be sharpened over time, even in its first incarnation, it is always immensely potent, frequently electric, and made unique by the fact that while it deals with the breakdown of Fa'a Samoa (the Samoan Way) it does so without collapsing into a work about cultural alienation.

An aged Samoan man, Ropati (played compellingly by Ene Petaia) is shunted into a final, bleak, institutional home in New Zealand, where he relives many of the enigmatic milestones of his life through feverish dreams and flashbacks over the course of two days.

The audience is never certain of sequence, much as in a real dream, but a caregiver, Losa (Anapela Polataivao), anchors the back and forth drifting of Ropati's captivating memories through 23 seamless acts, assisted by his journal and Ropati's monologues.

Ropati is regularly attended, also, by versions of himself as a younger man and a grandson, Sione, all of whom are doubled with infectious zeal by Pua Magasiva.

A tragedy in the classic form, Two Days is nonetheless well-leavened by wonderfully zippy humour and occasional special effects. Direction by Colin Mitchell extracts coherence where less certain hands might let the pace of the play spawn confusion, and designer Sean Coyle provides a memorably evocative set.

Much of the secondary dialogue is in Samoan, making the play richer for bilingual audiences but without substantially excluding those of us outside the language.