Theatre - Achieving distinction on the world stage

During the International Arts Festival, who were we?

By John Smythe
June/July 2010

Creative excellence and strong production values made the homegrown theatre productions a high point of the recent New Zealand International Arts Festival. In retrospect, however, I am intrigued by the ‘cultural identities’ of the productions.

Of the 14* festival shows I saw, seven were original New Zealand works. Five had premiered and toured elsewhere, and were included under the ‘Restage’ initiative. Given that all the international shows had also ‘been around’, this new policy levels the playing field for local productions. Two were world premieres. Every festival has a key role to play as ‘midwife’/co-producer, and being present at the birth of a brand new show is a special privilege.

I include The Letter Writer (Circa) as ‘local’ because, although it was ‘born and raised’ in France, its writer/director Juliet O’Brien is from Wellington. So are the composer/sound designer, the set and lighting designers, and three of the five actors.

Powerfully socio-political and poetic, it features a Zurenkenian letter writer and a refugee from political repression in Morland. Both are fictitious countries but clearly redolent of western and eastern Europe. Morland is made ‘foreign’ to us with a guttural, made-up language.

A stunningly staged work of visual and physical theatre by Red Leap, based on a graphic novel by an Australian of Chinese heritage, The Arrival (Opera House) also involves fictitious countries, although here the migrant is confronted with an unintelligible language in the surrealistically represented new land.

Ian Hughes’ Ship Songs (Festival Club) interweaves the intrepid journeys of an 18th century Irish whaler (who serves as narrator), a 20th century Yorkshire nurse (Hughes’ mother) and a 14th century Chinese admiral, all on the high seas in quests for new worlds.

Seating most of its audience at ‘live’ consoles, Apollo 13: Mission Control (Downstage) involves us as role-players at NASA’s Mission Control as the all-American characters recreate the drama of the abortive 1970 Apollo 13 lunar landing mission. The quest is to ‘bring them home’ (ie the US).

Blending a love story, character comedy, songs and music, He Reo Aroha (Soundings Theatre) pits lonely success in New York against true love back home in a small Kiwi fishing village.

Of the five ‘Restage’ productions, He Reo Aroha is the only one that involves distinctly Kiwi characters in a New Zealand setting (even if they did tend to lapse into American accents when singing their original songs in English; a pet bugbear of mine).

One of the two world premieres commissioned by the festival clearly distinguishes itself as Kiwi.

The ingenious 360 (Te Whaea Theatre) places its audience – limited to 85 per sitting – on swivel chairs in a pit surrounded by a circular stage. It tells a tale, spanning 50 years, about a chap called Gee who runs away from his vaudevillian circus family to make his fortune in ‘the real world’ before finding himself unable to return home. But ‘home’ has no cultural identity.

Mark Twain and Me in Maoriland (Soundings Theatre) is firmly set in Whanganui, and on the Whangaui , in 1895 then back in 1864. It evokes an itinerant Mark Twain’s encounters with, and attempts to write about, the colonial establishment (local government, missionaries and armed forces), the kupapa Maori (friendly to the colonial forces) and the Pai Marire/Hauhau rebels, seen by Twain as the true patriots.

A ‘work in progress’, I rate it highly for its ambition and feel confident its next incarnation, at a major Wellington venue later this year, will bring it closer to its potential.

So of the seven homegrown productions, only two – He Reo Aroha and Mark Twain and Me in Maoriland – are culturally rooted in New Zealand. The Letter Writer and The Arrival are set in fictitious lands, 360 is non specific, Apollo 13 is set in the US and Ship Songs, although it includes an immigrant to New Zealand, is happily ‘at sea’ with no Kiwi voice in the mix.

Compare this with the festival’s international theatre component: 11 and 12, clearly located in French Africa; Sound of Silence, a Latvian take on the global love revolution; Between The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, utterly English; and The Walworth Farce, very Irish and set in South London.

T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T. offers a Polish take on an Italian classic. Inside Out, with its multinational cast, gives circus a Swedish sensibility. Only The Tragical Life of Cheeseboy, from Adelaide, opts for fantasy with no fixed abode.

The festival’s selection criteria – and the message it gives to our playmakers – seems to be that while Maori characters and stories offer a marketable point of difference, there is no place for distinctively Pakeha stories. Strange.

To read reviews of the NZIAF shows, go to www.theatreview.org.nz, click on ‘Reviews’ and, from the ‘Festival’ drop-down menu, select ‘New Zealand International Arts Festival 2010’.