Homefires at the Herald Theatre

By PETER CALDER

The second piece in what writer Hone Kouka calls "a loose trilogy ... looking at the effects [on Maori] of urban drift", this play was originally written for two women and was highly regarded when it first appeared in 1998.

It's now been reworked to be the story of two brothers - the city-based Tau (Rawiri Paratene), and Jacob (Rangimoana Taylor), who has remained on the ancestral land, though he seems oddly isolated from the family he might have been expected to share it with.

It is a strange concoction which mixes the poetic and the vernacular, the stylised and the realistic, into something occasionally potent but ultimately confused and a little confusing.

The piece snaps back and forth in time - the changes are well-signalled by Vera Thomas' neat lighting design - and the two actors incarnate the energy of childhood and the painful burden of mid-life with considerable skill. Paratene shows flashes of the impish comic brilliance which is matched by Taylor's stately gravitas.

But slowly the play reveals the old family secrets which stain the space between them, and the stakes of the prickly sibling relationship get higher and higher.

In the early stanzas, Paratene and Taylor, two of the oldish warhorses of Maori (and, indeed, Pakeha) drama, give themselves the space to breathe, enjoying the eloquent silences which Kouka has scripted.

They quickly command the small space in which they work, but as the piece wears on they become at times too large for it: sheer volume seems to take the place of passion and we find ourselves longing for some texture and subtlety to the men's extremes of emotion.

There's more than enough polish on show here (Ross Gibbs' clever set design is evocative and dramatically functional) but the piece never settles into a consistent style - at times it's kapahaka ballet, at others it's domestic drama inspired by Arthur Miller - and so it struggles to create a coherent dramatic experience.

In short, it still feels like a work in progress and it's tempting to wonder whether the fact that the director, the enormously gifted Nancy Brunning, is Kouka's partner has anything to do with that. The sense remains that it might have benefited from having a sterner hand on the helm.