Putting people before prophet

By GREG DIXON

It's not the sort of place you expect to see royalty, but there he was, on a Tuesday night, at Downstage Theatre in Wellington sitting among the hoi polloi like he, too, was one of the great unwashed.

And by all accounts this particular HRH - Prince Edward - enjoyed The Prophet, the newest work by our leading Maori playwright Hone Kouka, very much. That Kouka's new play - which had its world premiere at the just-finished New Zealand Arts Festival - works as well for a toff from Up Over as it does for local audiences satisfies the writer.

"That's what I like about being the writer: sitting in the dark auditorium and just listening to people's responses to something you've thought up. I sit there thinking, 'Well, this is what I wanted to convey, I wonder whether people take it that way?' But when people see other things in it as well, I really like that."

In The Prophet, which begins its week-long Auckland run at the Maidment Theatre on Friday, five middle-class teenage cousins return home to the East Coast for the unveiling service (a headstone ceremony) of another young cousin who took his life a year before. Over three days, as they play basketball at a local court, the cousins try to make sense of the death and deal with their new role of adulthood.

"The characters are hurting. But at the end of it, they've had their say, they've had their release. [The play is] saying, 'Okay, let's move forward, let's build on something really good here'," Kouka says.

Leadership is another theme. The dead teenager is the play's prophet, a boy who had a vision which had been interpreted by all as a sign he would someday lead the iwi, perhaps even Maoridom, into the promised land.

"It's a different take, because young Maori aren't usually doing well. And when they do, we put so many expectations on them. We want them to be a leader. The play is very gently saying we can all do it together."

The 36-year-old drew inspiration from his own experience - a young, high-achieving cousin took his life while Kouka was touring another play in 1999 - but, just as importantly, it completes a cycle of work that began eight years ago.

The Prophet is the third of a trilogy for Kouka. The first, 1996's Waiora, encompassed the Maori urban drift during the 50s and 60s. Home Fires, the second, which debuted in 1998, set itself in the 70s and 80s and looked at those who stayed on tribal lands.

The Prophet, directed by Nina Nawalowalo, is Kouka's contemporary take on Maoridom. "This is looking at the new generation now and seeing the effects of urbanisation and what it is to be a young Maori - or a young person, really - today."

The trilogy is something of a happy accident. Kouka did not intend to write three plays encompassing Maori experience over the past 50 years when he sat down to write Waiora in the mid-90s, but each play led to the next.

"It kind of fell into place. The first play left these questions. I thought okay, I'll answer them in the next. That play left other questions, so I thought I would answer them in a third play.

"It feels quite complete now. And, as one of my aunts said, it's really nice to hear what the young people have to say because we don't tend to listen to them very often."

But while his new work is about the young and features a young cast, Kouka really wrote The Prophet for their parents. It is also a more optimistic piece than the first two plays and it marks a conscious effort to move away from the epic. He got tired of seeing the phrase "Maori epic" attached to any big Maori play that was put on.

"I thought it's starting to be a cliche now. If anyone wants a tragedy, a Maori writer will do it for you. But I knew I'd written a couple of plays like that. So I thought I'll write something that's contemporary, something closer to a pop song with weight to it."

Performance

* What: The Prophet, by Hone Kouka

* Where and when: The Maidment, March 26-April 3