Reading with raw emotion

The difficulties of a racially mixed marriage are the subject of a moving new play by Stephen Sinclair, writes EMMA CHAMBERLAIN.

A semicircle of six chairs in an amorphous hotel banquet room; a small audience sitting tight against the semicircle forming a makeshift stage; six actors, someone to read the stage directions, and a script.

The first public reading of The Bellbird, a play by Stephen Sinclair, was a plain occasion. But then, that was the point.

It was the final stage of a two-day workshop devoted solely to Sinclair's story of forbidden love between a 19th-century Maori man named Apirana and a Pakeha woman named Florence.

An initiative of Second Unit, the R&D wing of Auckland Theatre Company, it was an occasion for the script alone. Ten readings and workshops are planned this year, to flush out new writing talent.

The actors, director and playwright had all taken their pound of flesh in the two days before. And free from theatrical baubles, the audience would have its at this Waitangi Day reading.

"I was surprised how moved the audience was at the end," says Sinclair, who also wrote Ladies Night and the one-man-show Blowing It.

"Obviously it's supposed to be moving, but I thought it was quite extraordinary that it happened just from a reading."

The audience was discernibly, despondently silent at the end - a collective thud of hearts as Florence began weeping for her dead husband.

Apirana's family and Florence had never really accepted one another. After Apirana's death, Florence was shunned by Pakeha as well because she had married a Maori.

Her predicament is based on real letters dating from the 1870s. Sinclair found the letters at the National Archives in 1983 when he was working as a Maori translator.

The audience was engrossed, pulled along by a good yarn and by the inherent nature of storytelling, which a simple reading exaggerated. Its heavy, attentive silence was like that of a child being read a bedtime story.

Elizabeth McRae read the part of Pakeha matriarch Mrs Harrington, Rima Te Wiata played her Maori counterpart Tapairu, Ros Worthington read the part of Florence and Tereapa Kahi read Apirana.

Relative unknown Kate Ferguson read Aoraki, the Maori rival for Api's affections, and Adrienne Thurston read the part of scatty Elsie, a model of respectability with her shallow marriage.

The workshops and readings are also an opportunity to test potential shows for the theatre company, says Second Unit co-producer Oliver Driver.

"Once we programme a play as main bill, we need 10,000 people to come and see it. While we are doing [this] for the benefit of the writer, we don't want to end up with just a great script that the writer can walk away with. We want to end up with a great production."

The 10 plays for the year have not been finalised, and Driver would make no promises about the number of the plays that would make the theatre company's main bill. Write something stunning and he may not be able to refuse you.

*The readings are free and open to the public. They will be held on the first Tuesday of each month at Rydges Hotel.