Actors Aruna Po-Ching and Joe Folau perform in the New Zealand play Officer 27.
Playwright Aroha Awarau has created a sensitive and engaging drama out of something that is almost unimaginably tragic - the random death of a young man cut down in his prime as an innocent bystander at a police shooting.
Although inspired by a heavily publicised incident, the play moves beyond
the particularities of the event and takes us inside the mind of a mother as she searches for healing.
The story unfolds in a cemetery where a grieving Niuean mother encounters a palagi street kid who lost his mother to cancer. Their cross-cultural friendship generates plenty of down-to-earth humor and the tragedy is given relevance by placing it within the rhythms of everyday life.
With a journalist's instinct for revealing detail, the characters are delineated with great subtlety and emerge with all the messiness and contradictions of real people.
Aruna Po-Ching takes us on a remarkable journey as the mother loses her sense of what is real before finding a way to reconnect with the things that make life worth living.
