Kiwis sparkle but 'Leah' maddening

Arts editor LINDA HERRICK finds some shows worth seeing.

Local drama was to the fore in the final week of New Zealand Festival 2002, with three new productions - Ranterstantrum, The World's Wife and The Underwatermelon Man - winding up runs which attracted glowing reviews and enthusiastic audiences.

The last two are set for Auckland seasons and Ranterstantrum should come here, it's that good.

And then there was the much-hyped New Zealand Actors Company launch of Leah, which premiered at Wellington Opera House on Wednesday and opens at Sky City on Wednesday.

Seen back to back, all four were a litmus test of the state of theatre in this country. Samoan writer Victor Rodger's Ranterstantrum was the most directly relevant because it is set in New Zealand and addresses the issue of racism towards Pacific Islanders.

There was a delicious irony in the way the play, delivered in the cramped space at Downstage, opened with Robbie Magasiva (a stripper in TV3's The Strip), performing a strip - an object of lust to palagi women in that mode but not so desirable when he morphed into a balaclava'd thug.

With tight direction by Colin McColl, Ranterstantrum used a nifty balance of humour, surtitles and music to tell the story of a yuppie couple dealing with a home invasion and rape, and their subsequent reaction when a young Samoan man turns up unexpectedly for dinner.

Magasiva handled himself with aplomb, with solid support from the small cast, and there was an admirable lack of waffle and self-indulgence.

The World's Wife, Fiona Samuel's clever adaptation of Carol Ann Duffy's collection of poetry, was also superb. With spartan props, Samuel, Rachel House and Elizabeth McRae delivered a hilarious - but sometimes menacing or sad - rapid-fire sequence of vignettes based entirely on the viewpoint of women such as Medusa, Mrs Darwin, Queen Kong and Myra Hindley.

Not only were the three actors in sparkling form, the live soundtrack performed at the side of Te Papa's Soundings Theatre stage by Don McGlashan and David Long was extraordinarily diverse without being intrusive.

The costumes designed by Marilyn Sainty were to die for. And McRae's Frau Freud was worth the ticket price alone - a reminder of what a powerful actor she is.

The night I saw The Underwatermelon Man, at the lovely old St James Theatre, I was surrounded by hundreds of kids (and their parents) who screamed, laughed, shouted, booed and clapped all the way through the show. Underwatermelon Man is one of a kind, an extension of the fantasy book and CD created a couple of years ago by Fane Flaws, Peter Dasent and Neill Gladwin. It is nonsense, in the best sense of the word, a melange of aerial flying, song, dance, music and magic, and it features some quite amazing visual tricks.

Given the age of its target audience, it needs a little tightening, especially in the second half.

Now to Leah. It was a tragedy, all right. As I said earlier, this Simon Bennett-directed adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear has been hyped up to the eyeballs and expectations were running high when it opened to a less-than-full-capacity audience last week.

The saga about the mad king and the murderous rivalries of his three female heirs has been regendered here, with Geraldine Brophy taking on the challenge of Leah. Cameron Rhodes, Tim Balme and Ian Hughes play her three sons, while Robyn Malcolm is her loyal consort, the Countess of Kent, who poses as a man for self-preservation.

You can have all the gimmicks in the world to "liven" up Shakespeare - such as Brophy's twin-coned Marge Simpson head-dress - but the No 1 rule is being able to hear the dialogue clearly. This was not uniformly the case and, even worse, some of the actors delivered their lines in monotone like a schoolroom detention.

However, Robyn Malcolm was outstanding, clear, strong and convincing, as was Sara Wiseman as the Duchess of Albany.

Brophy applied plenty of noise and hysteria to her interpretation of the mad monarch but as she shrieked and wailed through one scene towards the end of the three-hour production (yes, three hours), I heard a fellow sufferer mutter, "Oh, for God's sake!"

I was with him; my mind kept drifting into another world where I was watching Moira from Shortland Street having a tantrum with the kids.

The Opera House seats are covered in ancient leather which emit loud squelching noises at the slightest movement. Towards the end of Leah, the theatre was resonating with its own soundtrack, hundreds of restless people squirming on hundreds of farting whoopie cushions, particularly at the death scene finale which was unnecessarily gross and could send Hughes into therapy for years.

I still advise people to see Leah because it is a deeply surreal experience and our reviewer of the Auckland production, Peter Calder, may have an opposite view to mine.

But I couldn't help wishing we'd seen someone of the calibre of the aforesaid Elizabeth McRae pull it together in the central role - and that Bennett had had the wisdom to tighten the script by about one-third.

As one of the final lines said, "Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say."