South Auckland stories on stage

By LINDA HERRICK

Five yearsago actor Max Palamo was, by his own admission, a "what are you doing here?" guy in Paremoremo Prison, serving a sentence for wounding with intent, a charge reduced from attempted murder after a guilty plea.

"The guy I hurt was one of my friends," says Palamo quietly. "I was just so drunk. I thought he'd raped my cousin. I was totally lost - I woke up at the police station and I had no idea what was going on. I was so ashamed."

At the time of the attack, in September 1996, Palamo - now 26 - was helping the Aotearoa Young People's Theatre devise a play called Legacy, written by Fiona Graham and directed by Sam Scott. Today, four-year sentence served (with time off for good behaviour), Palamo is back with Scott, working on British actor-writer Lennie James' specifically commissioned work, The Sons of Charlie Paora, about a coach who gives everything to his South Auckland "boys".

"Sam Scott is Charlie Paora to me," says Palamo.

The two first met when Scott was auditioning for a youth theatre summer show, Blood and Bone, written by Willy Davis. "I was in my last year at Nga Tapuwae College and I went along to watch one of my friends. Sam said I couldn't stay - if I wanted to stay in the hall I had to take part."

Scott recalls that Palamo was only "vaguely interested ... a kind of 'Oh yeah?' attitude".

"At the end of the day I asked him if he'd be interested if I was to call him back," she says. He was, and Palamo's fledgling acting career was on its way, with Blood and Bone, Still Speeding and then the devising stages of Legacy - all with Scott and the AYPT.

"Max was on remand and because we knew his sentencing was coming up, we were working to see if we could get him a suspended sentence by keeping him involved in theatre but that wasn't the case," says Scott. "He went inside and I'd go visit him with Wesley [Dowdell, who is also in Charlie Paora], Jason [Webb, ditto] and Madeleine Sami, who were three very good friends who'd all been in the shows together. We were devastated."

But why persist with a young man who, according to the newspaper reports at the time of sentencing, inflicted a "frenzied" and "dreadful" attack?

"When this incident happened ... I couldn't put the picture together," says Scott. "Whenever he'd been in one of my shows his passion and commitment was so ... I never had a problem, he was such a leader as well. I couldn't put it together and I thought, hang on there, something clicks for him in making theatre and clearly he could be a statistic. I felt with the person I'd got to know, I had a responsibility of some sort."

Towards the end of Palamo's sentence, he was allowed out on day leave to join rehearsals for Sam Scott's Still Moving. On release, he joined the cast on stage at the Auckland Town Hall in February 2000 for a performance the Herald reviewer described as having "an extraordinary quality of stillness that suggests deep fires within".

The Sons of Charlie Paora, where he plays one of five Pacific Island youths mourning the loss of their part-Maori coach who has given more to them than his own two children, "is a step up from the other shows," says Scott, who has changed the name of the company from AYPT to Massive Company. "The whole show is woven in truth, the story has come essentially from the cast."

"Joe Folau and I were thinking of doing a show about males, how males think and feel, specifically Pacific Island males," says Palamo.

"We went over to lunch at Sam's in 1997 [before he was sentenced] and talked to her about it. She was going the same way and said she knew Lennie James in London who might be able to write it. We were like, 'Okay, a guy from England? Writing a show about guys from South Auckland?' Then she showed us his BBC film Storm Damage based on his early life in south London and it was pretty close to how we were."

Scott brought James out to New Zealand, where he hung out with the boys for a month, listening to their stories, visiting the places where they grew up, playing music.

"Watching his reactions opened us up to him. At first we were a bit scared of him but he said he didn't want to write the kinds of stories we were telling him because he didn't know us. After a month we got really close and he said he was ready to write the story."

* The Sons of Charlie Paora, Herald Theatre, October 3-13.