Netting new fans

A drunk, gay Irishman trying to perform the haka had the audience swapping tears for laughter during last year's Auckland season of Whero's New Net, staged by youth-theatre group Massive Company.

Earning full houses and critic comments such as "stunning" and "seamless", the play has now hit the road for a North Island tour.

Hands have hurt from clapping in Gisborne and Hamilton; over the next three weeks it's the turn of Upper Hutt, Wellington, and Auckland outposts Papakura and Takapuna. Penned by talented playwright Albert Belz, Whero's New Net has its genesis in literature luminary Witi Ihimaera's 1977 short-story collection The New Net Goes Fishing, about the dislocation and alienation arising from Maori migration from country to city.

Transplant that rural-urban movement to the 21st century's "global village" and you get a young Maori woman much further from her whakapapa. Rock chick Whero Mahana (played by up-and-coming talent Bree Peters) is on the verge of breakthrough into London's alternative-music scene when a long-lost cousin turns up with her estranged father's diary, intensifying her homesickness.

Meanwhile, her Irish manager and flatmate Dermott (played by Wesley Dowdell, aka Outrageous Fortune's endearing try-hard Aaron Spiller) is fighting the pull back to his home village, in between smooches with his corporate-ladder-climbing advertising exec boyfriend Tupo (played by Shortland Streeter-turned-lawyer Blair Strang), who's been dubbed the production's "chocolate god."

And yes, the straight blokes found those kissing scenes awkward at first, to the point where director Sam Scott had to tell them to get closer. So why does this play warrant a national tour? For a start, if any play's going to do well south as well as north of the Bombays, it's one about the classic Kiwi OE.

Young or old, Maori or Pakeha, city slickers or small-towners, New Zealanders can identify with the tug-of-war between OE and home, past and future, adventure and familiarity, family and friends, dreams and stark reality. Even if they've never been overseas, people from all walks of life can connect with the play's "what ifs" and relate to at least one of the very different, carefully teased-out characters.

Belz's approach of spanning cultures and ethnicities, rather than just his own Maori heritage, draws people in, says artistic director Scott. "We've had Pakeha people come up and say 'thanks for acknowledging we're not rootless, that we care about our line'."

When Scott first commissioned the play, she put complete faith in Belz (a television, film and theatre writer and 2006 winner of rising-star accolade The Bruce Mason Playwriting Award) and into her actors. Any play staged by Massive – a troupe of emerging and professional artists who create locally germane theatre – begins with the stories and experiences of those involved, and this play was no different.

In a collaborative effort, Scott got the actors doing improv to flesh out the play's skeleton which, at that stage, had only a beginning, an end, a protagonist, and Ihamaera's book as its axis. Meanwhile Belz, whom you may remember as Dr Ropata's cousin-from-the-sticks Manny in '90s Shortland Street, furiously scribbled notes.

Admitting he's not used to others sticking their oars into his work, 36-year-old Belz says the collaboration made the play what it is. "Massive's dealing with a lot of issues involving younger people, so it made perfect sense to jump in there and paddle along with everybody. The incubation time developed the narrative, yielded funny-but-natural-sounding dialogue, and gave the actors an ownership of the play which comes through in their performances."

But while Belz was open to input, says Scott, he never let himself be pushed off-course from the play's core. Weaving together ideas and themes like a virtual net, Belz strikes that tricky balance between humour, drama and pathos; hope holds hands with disappointment without feeling forced. And he's not a fan of spoonfeeding the audience; rather, the twists upset expectations.

A feature film is currently in the first stages of development – a step supported by Ihimaera, who attended the new season's opening night in Gisborne on July 30. Plainly proud of the play, Ihimaera says it's a privilege to have his work "re-visioned."

"The play cleverly balances the questions of home and identity, and discovers that they're still the same as they were in the 1970s: all of us are still trying to find a papakainga [home] no matter where we live in the world. Albert has a tremendous talent and ability to capture in theatrical language the situations and relationships that we, as New Zealanders, can recognise and say, 'Yes, that's us'."

* Whero's New Net plays at Takapuna's Pumphouse Theatre, Auckland, August 19-22; Wellington's Downstage Theatre, August 26-29; Upper Hutt's Expressions Theatre, September 4-5; and Papakura's Hawkins Theatre, September 10-11.