AK03: Greenstone carver's fall from grace

By GREG DIXON

Jim Moriarty calls it damned interesting. How could it be, the Wellington-based actor-director wonders, that a play about Maori by a Maori writer, a play with a story so deeply in the guts of what it means to be Maori, could come to be commissioned by the Court Theatre in Christchurch? "That's probably one of the most middle-class theatres in the country," Moriarty says.

And yet the Court commissioned playwright Briar Grace-Smith's Potiki's Memory Of Stone, which opens its Auckland season tonight at the Regent Theatre as part of the AK03 festival.

"You wonder, woah, what's going on?" Moriarty continues.

Progress, I suggest. "Absolutely. That's the bridge-building stuff I want to keep on advocating, not the stuff Paul Holmes is currently throwing around.

"But then Christchurch is such a bloody interesting place. I've won a contract to direct a stage version of Once Were Warriors. Guess who's putting the money up? A middle-class, Pakeha-Englishman, a self-made man, an insurance broker, is putting up the $9 million to get this thing off the ground. There's a lot of this going on."

All this aside, Moriarty credits Court artistic director - and director of Potiki - Cathy Downes with the vision to add the play to its 2003/2004 season. Potiki is also, Moriarty emphasises, not a strictly Maori tale. It's about human beings falling from grace and it's written by a strongly multicultural playwright.

"And it could stand up in any theatre in the world."

Potiki's Memory Of Stone is, at base, a thriller. The story is about a young greenstone carver who knows there is an enigmatic and dangerous secret surrounding his childhood. Twenty years before on the West Coast, two carvers - Tam (played by the great George Henare) and Potiki's father Manaaki (Moriarty) - had taken Potiki on a search for a sacred greenstone boulder. Something terrible happened, it wreaks havoc on all it touched, and it's in the slow remembering of this secret that Grace-Smith puts real meat on her play's deceptively small frame.

Indeed, Moriarty says Grace-Smith - and he's appeared in two or three of her previous works, including the acclaimed Purapurawhetu - has a real skill for sucking her audience into what might seem like a domestic scenario, a situational drama.

"She's almost like a weaver. She weaves you in and gets you caught up in the fibre and next minute rips you asunder. It roars off."

The play's heart is the boulder, a taonga, a sacred object.

"It's about what happens to you if you don't buy into respecting it, that you can get a big slap on the hand if you don't do things the right way. It's really important to their whakapapa that this thing is held sacred. The character I play is absolutely obsessed with getting hold of and cutting into a piece of stone. Throughout the history of his iwi, it has been clearly stated that you do not touch this one.

"We can all get a bit obsessive-compulsive about things but Manaaki's absolutely fixated on it. He goes to a place he shouldn't go to and it desecrates this rock."

"Is it about faith?" I ask. "You call it faith, I call it wairua. It's about the spiritual side of being human."

The impact on Manaaki and Potiki's family is terrible. The gods of this particular taonga seem pretty hard on human infallibility. "It's about respecting nature and its power. You don't go up the mountain at certain times of the year, if you are Maori you understand that. You need to obey that ancient lore."

But it is also a metaphor, Moriarty says, for the way we live today. It is about the lore that can still underpin how we behave.

"That is the complexity of this particular work. It's very modern, it's set now, but it's very much about how those old values are the ones that will ultimately prop up this culture through the next century, if it is to survive."

Other themes are the commercialisation of greenstone, incest, and the nature of memory and its power to heal or hurt.

"Briar doesn't write anything that is not from the perspective that is full of wairua, the spirit of being Maori, that everything is living, has been, is now and always will be. I guess that is the power of her as a Maori, as a woman, as a playwright."

Grace-Smith's name should already be familiar to anyone with half an eye on New Zealand theatre.

Belonging to the Ngati Hau hapu of Nga Puhi, she has worked as an actor and writer with the Maori theatre companies Te Ohu Whakaari and He Ara Hou.

Her early plays, Don't Call Me Bro and Flat Out Brown, were first performed at the Taki Rua Theatre in Wellington in 1996.

Her Nga Pou Wahine won the Peter Harcourt award for best short play at the 1995 Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards. That same year Grace-Smith received the Bruce Mason Playwright's Award. Purapurawhetu was judged Best New Zealand Play at the 1997 Chapman Tripp theatre awards. As well, she was made an Arts Foundation Laureate in 2000.

Moriarty says there's a maturity in Grace-Smith's writing beyond her thirtysomething years.

"I've been around the theatre game for 30 odd years now and most contemporary writers, I've either worked with their stuff, or know of them. This is a particularly mature piece of work from the gifted young writer."

And Moriarty says the quality of acting talent - award-winning actress Jennifer Ludlam and Toi Whakaari graduates John Katipa (Potiki) and Miriama McDowell fill out the cast - means it's a tight production.

"It's an hour and half, no interval. In the first 20 minutes the audience are belly laughing. Then she's got you and it's woof, in goes the bloody knife.

"She forces you to run all the way home to an almost unbearable climax. And there's a little bit of quiet after the storm where we get a little bit of time to go oh, my god - and you know you've been to the theatre."

Performance

* What: Potiki's Memory of Stone

* Where: Regent Theatre, St James Complex

* When: Tonight-Friday 7.30pm

Herald Feature: Auckland Festival AK03

Auckland Festival website