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Professor Ritchie's text was prepared for a Son et Lumiere experiment at the Founders' Theatre in Hamilton last year. By his own account, it was a very stiff and awkward affair, almost without movement, only lights to indicate continuity of scene and the progress of the action. Mr Campion boldly discarded all this for his production … and while he deeply respected the text, worked it again, in collaboration with the author. Thus they devised a prologue… which, on the opening night, was gawky and awkward enough to depress the spirits and painfully flex the mind against what was coming. Excellent in conception, it presented a stylised view of the modern Maori, singing sad songs to the guitar, or at work, performing in mime the tedious movements of freezing workers on the job, or girls at facftory treddles, with conversation running the casual gamut of their interests: sex and horses. This was a first night of course, and the gawkiness would no doubt relax later in the season, take fire and express in this dramatic shorthand the cheerful poverty of the lives of the people to whom we have brought the blessings of a technological age. But from this unpromisiong start, the evening broadened into an extraordinary poetry and majesty. The awkward young before us shed their jeans and skivvies to put on the traditional garb of their ancestors and there, enacted before us with the greatest skill, taste and a total lack of self-consciousness was their noble myth of creation, with strutting gods to tell us of their fields and powers…. Part II gives us the plight of people deprived of myth by the European invasion. The gods can no longer live on this soil, so there must be heroes, in this case, specifically, Te Rauparaha. ACT. |
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