Old before her time

By GILBERT WONG

Time, as Einstein famously proved and everyone knows, is relative. Before she arrives on stage 29-year-old Wellington actress Rachel House takes about 15 minutes to age into the 161-year-old kuia Tiri Mahana.

Tiri Mahana is the centre of Witi Ihimaera's play Woman Far Walking which chronicles the life of one woman who happened to be born on February 6, 1840. Tiri is short for Tiriti and, as Mahana makes plain, she regards it as a fraud, spitting out her disdain at the "white goblins" who have come to live in her land.

The latest production of Woman Far Walking has undergone changes. Replacing Rima Te Wiata in the role of the young Tiri is Nicola Kawana. New director Christian Penny has worked with Ihimaera in editing the text more sharply, reducing its playing time. Penny has brought his own take to Tiri the elder. Instead of the slightly woebegone figure in a dressing gown, the current Tiri has the bearing of the old kuia. Like them, she wears black, elegant, Victorian dresses that bestow a certain regality.

At the national film archives House watched early footage of kuia born in the 19th century, intent on the way they held their bodies, walked and gestured. On stage the transformation is utterly convincing and House is the focus and centre of the play.

Woman Far Walking had its premiere at the New Zealand Festival of Arts last year and no other actor but House has played Tiri in the numerous performances since, during a national tour, at regional arts festivals and in the return season in Auckland this week.

In September Tiri goes overseas as Taki Rua Theatre takes the production to Hawaii for a festival of indigenous theatre.

So it is a part that House has come to know with unusual intimacy. She's so comfortable with Tiri that she has to stop and ponder some time how she exactly does do it: transforming herself into the character via the magic of makeup and acting.

House is 29 with long, tousled hair. She exudes rude health, smokes rollies, carries a cellphone and arrives at the dressing room a little flustered. She'd left this morning without her makeup bag and had to race back.

"Oh God, sorry about all this," she says in a husky voice.

She has strong cheekbones and large eyes that often show her amusement. Tiri is a crone, bent, hobbled and twisted by what she has experienced, but with the kind of grace that comes only with great age. The transformation occurs with surprising ease. House sits before her dressing-room mirror and fossicks in a zebra-skin handbag crammed with mysterious bottles and tubes.

"I'm not into using much makeup myself, so this was quite a curve to pick up," she says.

To help her to develop the look of Tiri, Taki Rua brought in makeup artist Tom Merito, who has been working on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings.

"Tom was great, he taught me about contours, how to use them properly." House takes a pottle of heavy foundation, the actual greasepaint of legend, and with a triangular sponge dabs it liberally all over her face, which quickly turns an almost wooden brown colour.

Then she reaches for another pottle, a shade of dark rimu, and sketches in the age and wrinkle lines of Tiri. House spends a lot of time smearing and sculpting the foundation cream to create new planes on her face.

The new contours change her face - it becomes thinner, careworn, as House etches in a series of dark wrinkle lines on her forehead. Up close they seem crudely drawn, but from a few steps back the illusion is startling and from the seats of the audience, totally believable.

Happy with her "contours", House rummages again and produces a phial of silver mascara. Her generous eyebrows disappear, to be replaced by strands of white hair.

Then it's time for her teeth to disappear under a thick coating of teeth black. The dental blackener is a German product, which, like the others, she obtains from chemists who specialise in stage makeup. "It's pretty toxic," she says, grimacing. She must wait until it dries before drinking or eating.

The final touch is a wig by wig-maker Patsy Trainor. Trainor's usual stock in trade are the wigs adopted by women who suffer baldness, either through alopecia or cancer treatments.

Tiri's hair is thinner and unruly. By now House is inhabiting her character. She practises "Tiri faces", old-woman frowns of scorn. She does so with workmanlike pleasure, like a builder hefting a well-balanced hammer.

When her mother first saw her as Tiri in Wellington, she told House, "That's how I look when I wake up in the morning."

* Woman Far Walking, directed by Christian Penny, Taki Rua Theatre, Herald Theatre, until August 19.