MICHAEL BILLINGTON casts a critical eye over a quartet of new local plays at the New Zealand Festival 2000 in Wellington.
Whenever I travel I seek out new plays. They are the clearest guides to a nation's current obsessions. And, on the evidence of the four new works I have seen at New Zealand Festival 2000, I would deduce that this is a multicultural country trying to define its future through the exploration of its past.
Stuart Hoar's Rutherford, at the Circa Theatre, is clearly a study of a national hero - Ernest Rutherford - who, by splitting the atom, not only destroyed the surety of matter but also profoundly affected morality and religion.
I like Hoar's play because it deals with big issues, shows that heroes are not necessarily heroic and argues that society has to accept responsibility for the military exploitation of scientific discoveries. The play, imaginatively directed by Susan Wilson and well acted by Ray Henwood as Rutherford and Bruce Phillips as his Russian protege, is oddly reminiscent of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen. But its virtue is that it shows Nelson-born Rutherford delivering us into the age of nuclear fission while arguing that we have to carry the can for the way his pioneering ideas were developed.
Hararu Mai, by Briar Grace-Smith, staged at Te Papa, is also about heroes. In this case the central figure, Silas, is a veteran of the Maori Battalion in the Second World War who in peacetime falls in love with a woman half his age and is finally revealed to be the man who killed her father in the heat of battle.
I take the play to be an exploration of the question of whether Maori should subscribe to, or reject, white European values. Silas argues it was necessary to enlist in order to fight fascism: his cousin Pearl counters that those who did were "forgotten the moment they stepped off the boat."
Grace-Smith uses the past as a metaphor for the present and implies that Maori have to respect the integrity of their own culture rather than seek to imitate Pakeha values.
I found its conciliatory conclusion to be imposed rather than organic but the play was stylishly written and George Henare as Silas, Rena Owen as his forceful cousin and Katie Wolfe as his young mistress all gave strong performances.
In a much lighter vein, Blue Smoke, at the James Cabaret, is also an exploration of New Zealand's past: in this case, the world of the garish clubs of the late-1950s. It is a world of drag-queens , strippers, old songs and even older jokes. But I take it the authors Rawiri Paratene and Murray Lynch are setting up an ironic contrast between past and present.
In the good old bad days liquor had to be drunk out of tea cups after hours, smoking was licensed, sexual ambivalence was presented obliquely and Maori women were often reduced to stripping and prostitution.
The show, vivaciously presented, appeals to audience nostalgia. What it does is remind us of how much progress New Zealand has actually made.
Finally, The Candlestickmaker, by Jacob Rajan and Justin Lewis at Downstage Theatre is both an exploration of astrophysics and of the possibilities of theatrical storytelling on the lines of the earlier Krishnan's Dairy.
Rajan's own virtuosity as an actor playing various characters with the aid of masks sometimes impedes narrative clarity. You come away remembering the singer, not the song. But the folk-tale charm is married to scientific ideas and the production taught me, as an outsider, that there is such a thing as an Indian/New Zealand theatrical style.
Indeed, taken together these four plays show that in New Zealand drama is a means of exploring national identity and the complex relation of past to present. New Zealand clearly has a vibrant new drama. Why, I wonder, is it so shy of presenting it to the world at large?
Theatre: Heroes from the past inspire vibrant dramas
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