MAORIDOM AND THEATRE

Te Ao Hou, June 1960, Page 15

MAORIDOM AND THEATRE by ERLE NELSON Mr Nelson is a well-known New Zealand playwright, at present employed in the Housing Section of the Department of Maori Affairs, Wanganui. Some years ago one saw plays in our theatres which were only British, with occasional plays from the Continent. The New Zealand play was almost unheard of. Today our theatre is undergoing a change—the New Zealand play is no longer a seven day wonder. This is indeed pleasing, but so far our New Zealand drama is pakeha, and the Maori is much of a stranger to our stages. Bruce Mason's play “The Pohutukawa Tree” is a step in the right direction; it has brought Maori actors on to a theatre stage besides being successfully televised in England. There is the well-known one-act play “The Greenstone Mere” and, I believe, other Maori plays which have been seen occasionally. All this is to the good. It is fair, however, to ask: is this the beginning of a Maori drama? Will a Maori drama come into being as a matter of course? I don't think anybody can predict what will happen in theatre with very great accuracy. Whether we in New Zealand will create a drama which belongs truly to our Maori people is still no more than an opinion. I believe theatre will welcome well written and well produced Maori plays. But Maori plays have to be written and Maori actors have to be found, trained and organised. There needs to be more than occasional Maori plays. We need Maori drama groups; we need these Maori drama groups to bring Maori plays into theatre—not one or two plays, but as many Maori plays as can be written and performed. We need Maori theatre. In Wanganui an attempt is being made to establish a Maori drama group. Actors chosen from members of the Putiki Maori Club will be acting in a Maori play which is to appear in the British Drama League festival in Wanganui during next July. These actors will be under the wing of the R.S.A. Little Theatre Society which has done excellent work in encouraging New Zealand plays. The idea of working through an established society is to give the actors the full benefit of that society's advice and resources. This should give the actors some valuable help, particularly as they will be competing against pakeha actors who have had a long theatre experience. I am confident that the Maori actors will give an excellent account of themselves. What our theatre needs most is a breath of fresh air—plays which have been taken out of drawing rooms and set against a New Zealand background. Maori plays and actors can do this. Not only will the setting of the play be fresh and unusual, but I am sure that the fine dramatic character of the actors themselves will bring to the stage a living quality we see all too rarely. That is one reason for my wanting to see a Maori drama established. I believe very sincerely that the future of a New Zealand drama which can stand up and live and breathe on a stage will depend on how far we bring our Maori people into it. Theatre stages many fine plays, the kind of plays that makes one feel proud to be a part of theatre. But too often we see plays which are shallow and empty, plays which have nothing worthwhile to say. It seems at times that theatre becomes sickly and weary like a very old man who is too tired to bother any more while life itself, full of tears and laughter, is a rushing stream that bustles around the very theatre in which we sit bored and fed up with ourselves. And the tragedy of this is that theatre people are some of the kindliest people I know, and their producers, actors and technicians are hard working and conscientious. Why, then, should this be? I think theatre sometimes forgets that it is, or ought to be, a part of the community. We see so many plays about people and places we don't really know that we get out of touch with life

Students of St Peter's Maori College, Northcote, Auckland, in “Skin-Deep”, a Maori comic opera by Paraata Reti, His Majesty's Theatre, Auckland, 1959. (HILL-THOMAS, AUCKLAND, PHOTOGRAPH) itself. We pretend to be other people so much that we forget what we ourselves are really like. The wonder is not that theatre becomes sickly and tired at times, but that this does not happen more often. A Maori drama which is seen on our stages as an ordinary part of theatre will help to bring the tears and laughter of real life onto our stages. That is why theatre is symbolised with two masks, one happy, one sad. That is what theatre is really about, the happiness and sadness of life, the whole of life from sorrow to joy, the whole of life as we ourselves know and understand it. The life we live in New Zealand and the communities in which we dwell are not pakeha alone. The heart and soul of New Zealand does not belong to the pakeha alone. Our life as a nation is both Maori and pakeha, and anything less than this is not true of New Zealand and never will be. A theatre which speaks with a pakeha tongue and says only what the pakeha wants to say, which shows only what the pakeha can see through pakeha eyes, is not truly a New Zealand theatre. It might think it is, or it might pretend to be, but it is not. There will never be a New Zealand theatre which can stand shoulder to shoulder with the theatres of the outside world unless the struggles and the hopes and the failures and the triumphs of the Maori people, together with those of the pakeha, become a part of New Zealand life on our stages. Only when Maori and pakeha stand together can we see what New Zealand life means. Only then can we hope to understand it—and ourselves. This small beginning in forming a Maori drama group in Wanganui is no more than a start. But it is a start on the right footing. To give audiences an experience of a traditional Maori play is to take those audiences into another experience of the human spirit. This will, I am certain, cause a demand for more plays of a like character. There will be an established group to fill that demand in Wanganui! Will such a small seed grow into a mighty kauri? I do not know. But this I do know; theatre will survive television, it will survive its own follies and weaknesses, and it will grow into a force which will play a large part in the life of our nation. Theatre will do this because it believes in itself and because it is not afraid of difficulties. One of the miracles of modern civilisation is the survival of live theatre; another miracle is the leaping into life of the Maori people, a race which many thought to be dying out. There, then, is the link between the two; both refusing to die, and both proudly flourishing. I believe in the future of the Maori race and in the future of live theatre. And I believe the two will come together for the betterment of our nation as a whole.