Rima Te Wiata sports a new look for her role as Paige in the play Hir. Photo/David St George
Rima Te Wiata sports a new look for her role as Paige in the play Hir. Photo/David St George
In a career spanning nearly four decades, Rima Te Wiata has played everything from a carnivorous plant to the warm-hearted, slightly batty and musically challenged Aunty Bella in Taika Waititi's Hunt for the Wilderpeople.
Along the way, there have been portrayals of some of Shakespeare's greatest female characters and moderndrama's most gutsy heroines, musical theatre roles — the tragic Nancy in Oliver — and, more recently, hard-case grandmothers. There was even a chain-smoking version of former PM Helen Clark.
So, you'd be forgiven for thinking Te Wiata had played it all.
Turns out she hasn't and it's taken Silo Theatre to cast her in a comedy where she's a wife and mother taking revenge on a formerly abusive, now dependent, husband by administering medication which includes oestrogen milkshakes.
The play's called Hir, (pronounced "here") and everything about it says there couldn't be a better play to reflect the here and now.
There's the writer: genderqueer playwright and performance artist Taylor Mac who prefers the gender pronoun judy — with a small j — and makes boisterous drag performances like the 24-hour-long 24 Decade History of Popular Music.
Then there's the story: Isaac (Arlo Green) returns home from fighting in Afghanistan to discover his mother, Paige (Te Wiata), has liberated herself from patriarchal ideas like cleaning and cooking, his sibling (Adam Rohe) is transitioning to a non-binary gender and their once dominating father, Arnold (Nathaniel Lees), has survived a stroke but is a shadow of his old self.
And the underlying themes: Mac's building a body of work that blows apart ideas about gender norms and power structures; Hir takes it to the extreme but also throws in addiction, housing, class, marriage and the trauma of war and domestic abuse. With the latter, judy conflates ideas about the violence of both so events in the wide world are compared to and contrasted with those ordinarily kept behind closed doors and drawn curtains.
Playing Paige, reckons director Sophie Roberts, could have Te Wiata "light a fire" under a whole generation of women.
"As a woman who has been squashed and marginalised and silenced, in many ways in her life, she has now gone, 'f*** that' and just set fire to the world around her," Roberts says.
How's Te Wiata going to light that fire?
She gets coy saying — perhaps predictably — you'll just have to come and see the play but what Te Wiata adds is that she couldn't have imagined doing a play like Hir when, for example, performing her first professional theatre role in 1980 at the Mercury Theatre in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
"I wouldn't have imagined anyone would write a play like this one but I am relieved that somebody has," she says. "It's a really big role, it's a real challenge. It's like Stephen Sondheim without the music. It's got a discipline within it that if you don't play your intentions and really go for it, it might not sing properly and it also isn't everyday language."
Rima Te Wiata as we're most used to seeing her. Photo/Andi Crown
She says Hir asks questions about whether we choose to dismantle old and possibly outdated social structures and project ourselves into the future as new people. That might be the central question but the play doesn't provide an answer.
"That's the question that's left for the audience to decide. Do you want to attach yourself to the familiarity and, to some extent, the security or horror of the past or do you want to risk, possibly the same thing, in the future? What's left if you actually dismantle those things and how do you want to reconstruct a new self?"
Like Te Wiata, Hir isn't a play Nathaniel Lees could have imagined (the two have known each for years but last performed together 22 years ago). The star of films like The Matrix Reloaded, Lord of the Rings and Sione's Wedding, Lees hasn't appeared on stage for 15 years; he took this role because Roberts asked him and he wanted to see if he could still do theatre.
Roberts says she wouldn't have been surprised had Lees turned down the part.
"It's just a series of humiliations for poor Arnold . . . but I think it's an extremely difficult and challenging role because Arnold is on stage the whole time but doesn't have a lot of dialogue and is sort of physically impaired," she says. "The kind of technique and stamina that is required to be present and actually giving a lot to storytelling when you don't have dialogue, that's really difficult to do."
But Lees acknowledges "poor Arnold" is somewhat the author of his own misfortunes.
"He was part of the initiation of this whole thing; he was a very violent man, very dominating, had a stroke and since that time — from that time — Paige has begun to exact her revenge and so he's been a presence but a much more diluted presence but, as the play progresses, his presence becomes more . . . not so much threatening, I suppose, but noticeable and he starts to impinge on the consciousness of, certainly, Paige.
"They forget to give him his medication but Paige mixes up his medication …"
This includes oestrogen milkshakes, which makes it sound like Paige could be monstrous. She's not, she's just complicated.
"It's just a really good piece of writing first and foremost," says Roberts. "That was what initially attracted me to it; it's kind of rare to find something that is brutal and hilarious simultaneously. You kind of — as an audience member and, I think, for the actors as well — it's like a series of emotional somersaults where, within a sentence, you're laughing and then horrified and then heartbroken.
"I don't read a lot of work that achieves that as strongly as this play does. I really love the attack of it, I love that it's not subtle work at all."
