THEATRE REVIEW: Leilani

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Review by Genevieve McClean

Mahuika step onstage as a fledgling theatre company and take their first bow to rapturous applause from a delighted audience. It’s 2016 and homelessness in New Zealand sits at record levels. An approximation puts the total of New Zealanders on the street at 40, 000.*   It is late winter, and we’ve just hit hailstorm season, but that’s not the play that’s the real world.  

Inside a warm and cosy theatre Leilani and her boyfriend Junior are waiting for the show to begin, but that’s not the real world, that’s the play..

So much work goes into mask.  It is deceptively physical work from the perspective of the audience. I am always delighted when mask is done well and the magic of it floods the stage, it’s transporting.  In Leilani Mahuika do not fail to deliver a poignant well told story and the magic of mask is there with many moments that deliver brilliance from the angle of a chin, the glint of an eye or the posturing that accompany a sassy delivery.  The effect of just three actors coming out to take a bow after meeting nine characters, is astonishing, a testimony to the versatility shown by Natasha Daniel and Aymee Karaitiana-Jones who in particular was very good.


Leilani is sweet and young as described in the publicity material, but she is also flawed, deeply flawed as all the characters are.  Which is exciting to see in a theatre production that aims for a distinctly “Kiwi” flavour.  I’ll come back to this.

Mask has its origins in ritual, voodoo, religious rites and ancient theatre in many cultures.  However Maori and Pacific cultures, – there’s not so much. Actually Papua New Guinea, and Fiji have a stronger mask history. In Maori history however, story telling has traditionally been imbued with reverence to ancestors in the presence of moko, whakapapa, and whakairo and the stories and poems themselves, and the waiata of course.

Western mask in theatre is never without reference to the past, the spiritual domain, because of those same links with the passage of life.  Greek drama used mask, creating archetype on stage, but much more recently in the 16th century in Italy, began the popular theatre form: Commedia Dell’Arte.  (This was an equivalent for Italians, to Shakespeare’s entertainment for the populace through theatre).  

Now it’s Commedia mask and the archetypes that have grown from Commedia that are informing what we are seeing in Auckland which is a local renaissance of the classical form.  There’s a spate of it, and long may it continue I say.

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I chatted after seeing Leilani with Regan Taylor who has recently finished a season of his work SOlthello, for example which uses Shakepeare and masks that are the “whakairo straight off the walls”.  
We asked what is “Aotearoa-centric theatre” and I now put this somewhat rhetorical question to you.  

Leilani, similarly mixes up the forms, but rather than reaching for the lofty classics it draws on the populist Commedia form of Mask, which is closer to clowning, but with often complex storylines.  Commedia is born of archetypal characters that meet each other in awkward improvised arrangements.  What’s wonderful about this is that this form allows the company to clown with flawed, stupid, self sabotaging, and annoying characters, that have all the sense of the real about them, and will be loved by young and new theatre goers, and a wide gamut of theatre goers, but loathed as well.  Loathed and loved. (Don’t take it personally, but yes the play IS about you).  

In Leilani, Tikanga Maori seems at first to have gone by the wayside, pushed out by the story of a deflated people using a Western form.  It’s a brave move to put Junior on stage at all, (you’ll see why), and Leilani herself, both of them amateur theatregoers, and not sophists. Of course it’s just a set up, it’s theatrical device, but  this is an uncomfortable twist for those audiences who go to the theatre to get away from the ever present derelicts on the street, or to rise above the troubles of the everyday.  You know, it’s an extraordinary thing to witness story telling that makes you squirm uncomfortably, and simple clowning that makes you experience sincere relief.  And SORRY, but Commedia as well as Shakespeare, are all about the troubles of the everyday.

So when Maoridom outs itself in a certain moment, that personally is my highlight of the night.  Thus the power of mask outs itself, and as all theatre practitioners who work with mask know, you must respect the mask.

In this show Mahuika throw open the doors to a bright future.  The cast have quickly become adepts in their work.  While the script is tight enough, the show itself could concertina a little and no doubt will in short time.  The actors are relishing their work and will require a few more of those huge applauses to settle completely into place, although they already have a powerful ownership of their roles.  It’s a great show, and a beautifully crafted new vessel for Auckland theatre.

*from a recent Al Jazeera article quoting an Otago Uni study.

Leilani runs from 4-13 August at Q Theatre loft.

Leilani
Thursday 4 August
7.30pm
Q Theatre Loft, 305 Queen St
Running time: 70 mins