Taonga: actor Nicola Kawana on Hone Tuwhare's No Ordinary Sun

Actor Nicola Kawana's play Kūpapa is part of Matariki. Photo / NZ Herald / Dean Purcell

Actor and playwright Nicola Kawana talks about a precious book.

If my house caught on fire, my signed, first edition copy of Hone Tuwhare's No Ordinary Sun is the one thing I'd take with me. It's taonga, and not just the book itself; it's also where I keep one of the letters that Hone wrote to me.

Hone Tuwhare is the best poet in the universe. I met him when I was performing my first professional theatre production, In the Wilderness Without a Hat, in 1989. This was the only play he wrote.

A few years later, I met him again, at one of his readings. We swapped addresses and started to write to each other. He was living near Dunedin on the coast at the time.

We would share all sorts of things and his letters were very beautiful. In one, he shared that he'd been asked to appear on a postage stamp; commenting that he couldn't think of anything worse than having the whole country lick him. (He also said that he had a face like the ass of an elephant!) He declined.

Another letter included a haiku that he had written for me. It said: "My love for you isn't minimal, it's animal." He was a very passionate man.

I had a great love of poetry as a teenager; and it was so wonderful to be able to write and receive letters from someone whose poetry I adored. Many of the letters he wrote had great advice about my own writing.

Actor Nicola Kawana holding a letter and book from poet Hone Tuwhare. Photo / NZ Herald / Dean Purcell.

I've just written my first play, called Kūpapa. It explores the life of Lucy Lord.

Lucy has always fascinated me ... a first-generation Māori/Pākehā wahine, who straddled both cultures. She's a controversial figure. She assisted the Government in purchasing land in her tribal area and was involved in a violent campaign against her own whanaunga. I have felt her near to me for 25 years but tried to not write about her, because I know so much of her life was troublesome.

I've played Lucy in two other productions, both about Gustavus Ferdinand von Tempsky. She was his guide, and possibly his lover. He also painted her. But I felt that her story hadn't been told and wanted to create a work that didn't tell it from a male perspective.

There is an image of her in Victorian clothes, which really interests me. I too am half-Pākehā and half-Māori and I can relate to the way in which she slipped through both worlds.

In 2001 I discovered that she was my great-aunt. That was a moment! I was staying with my cousin, who handed me my whakapapa. I saw Lucy's name and realised that she was the sister of my great-grandmother "Guide Sophia" (Sophia Hinerangi), the main guide at the Pink and White Terraces, then Whakarewarewa.

When I started writing Kūpapa I knew so much about her already. I'd been a real geek with my research, hunting down everything I could find about her in archives around the country. The best source is probably her letters, which are held in the Alexander Turnbull Library.

The most difficult thing about writing this play has been making things up! You see biopics sometimes and think "that didn't happen" ... but there has to be dialogue and tension in a play, so things need to be tweaked. It wasn't a comfortable process.

I think that it's great that the Government has introduced the New Zealand land wars as part of the curriculum. It provides a context for understanding who we are as a nation. We are restricted from travelling at the moment and this provides the opportunity to look deeper into our own history. For this reason, the timing of Kūpapa couldn't be better.

- As told to Joanna Mathers

Nicola Kawana's debut play Kūpapa will be performed during the Matariki season at Te Pou Theatre, Shed 1, 2 Mt Lebanon Lane, Henderson. Tickets $26-$32 from iticket.co.nz
Kawana also performs in Silo Theatre's Mauri Tau, July 2-18