Question of labelling, not quality

First-night flight was not the best publicity, but there is no bad publicity, writes PAUL BUSHNELL*.

The second week began in a blaze of disagreement about the quality of Mikel Rouse's Failing Kansas. This piece of extending rapping, which had been bizarrely billed as an opera, infuriated enough first-night patrons to make 40 of them walk out.

This was, in the end, a failure of festival advertising as much as anything else. Festival promotion must balance the need to attract the largest possible audience with the need to warn punters that the material they will see is likely to be challenging.

Several confrontational shows at the last festival had content warnings clearly labelled, and I can't recall many patrons fleeing.

Of course, deciding what might be a problem is particularly tricky with cross-cultural work, or the sort which blurs the boundaries between one form and another.

How can you say what something is like if it's not like anything else? And if it's not the content which might offend, but the style of the performance, it can be difficult to know where to draw the line. Explicit language is easy to identify, extreme production style less so.

In the case of Failing Kansas, a wilfully irrelevant set of film images accompanying the music added to the problems for those in the audience who had not prepared by reading In Cold Blood, the marvellous non-fiction novel by Truman Capote that provided the raw material for the piece. Things weren't helped on the first night by the rough sound mix, which made many of the words inaudible.

New Zealanders tend to be too polite as audiences and it is not a bad thing for them to learn they can walk out of what they don't like. I'm not sure if I've ever heard audiences boo here, but I have certainly attended my share of boo-able shows.

Before we're too quick to condemn what we don't understand, though, it's worth considering Henry Moore, the artist whose work is featured in a sleek, corporate-style exhibition at Te Papa.

When his sculptures were on display in Auckland in 1956, the letters page of this newspaper ran hot with outrage from correspondents who denounced the quality of the art. What's rubbish to one generation can seem classic to the next.

The classical music stage has been dominated by the Hilliard Ensemble, both on its own and in a popular pairing with saxophonist Jan Garbarek.

Other highlights were the Portuguese fado singer Misia; and Virginia Rodrigues, a vocalist from Brazil. She pleased her audience, and although there were some grumbles about an amateurish sound mix and lack of polish in the performance, for many, no doubt, there was delight in simply seeing in person the possessor of the remarkable voice featured on Nós, her album of carnival songs.

No reservations could be expressed about the technical quality of the luminous production by Robert Le Page of The Far Side of the Moon. Coolly, and with great tact, this play for solo actor featured an array of spectacular staging ideas. However, the technology was always purposeful, helping unfold the story of how two brothers grope towards ending their life-long estrangement.

Just like the dazzling seven-hour long Seven Streams of the River Ota at a previous festival, this show invited the audience in rather than going out to grab its attention.

Not so the major English theatre production to feature this year, a double-bill of plays from the Out of Joint Theatre Company: Rita, Sue and Bob Too, and A State Affair.

The premise for these two plays is strong: a gritty early slice of life on a housing estate in Thatcher's Britain in 1982, is followed by a play which returns to the estate where the playwright lived to give an update on the situation in 2000.

Thoroughly committed performances from the cast argue the case for both plays with power, but I found Andrea Dunbar's script for Rita much the more compelling of the two. By contrast, A State Affair is preachy, over-earnest and undramatic.

Two of the New Zealand festival commissions opened this week. The Underwatermelon Man has a tenuous plotline connecting the enactment of different rhymes from the popular book and CD by Fane Flaws.

What should have been consistently enchanting was only fitfully so on opening night, with a muddy sound mix obscuring words, and a feel of watching a dress rehearsal rather than a performance which many people paid handsomely to see.

By contrast, Douglas Wright's Inland sprang complete on to the stage.

This latest work by one of the country's top choreographers is as arresting as one could hope to expect, although it is top-heavy with talk. As interesting as the speech is, I wanted more of the time to be taken up with dance, because what is there is remarkable.

Taking the image of sheep as a metaphor for human interaction, Wright sets an ironic, often witty, cavalcade in front of the audience. And it finishes, just as Michael Parmenter's epic Jerusalem did a few years back, with a sublime homage to Colin McCahon.

This is definitely a show not to miss.

* Paul Bushnell is National Radio's arts editor