Rotorua playwright Hone Kouka. Photo / Rosalie Liddle Crawford
When Rotorua playwright Hone Kouka wrote Waiora Te Ūkaipō – The Homeland in 1995, he was grieving.
“I wrote it to grieve for my dad,” he said.
Premiering in 1996 after being commissioned by what is now the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts, Waiora toured nationally and internationally for five years. It then largely disappeared from professional stages, though for more than 15 years it has been studied as part of the school curriculum.
Now, three decades on, the play has returned to Wellington for the festival’s 40th anniversary programme, before a season at the Auckland Arts Festival. Kouka directs it himself.
For years, he resisted revisiting the work.
“I thought, who wants this dusty old thing?” he laughs.
Moving between film and theatre and watching his partner, Mīria George, focus increasingly on film-making, he assumed the play had run its course. It was only after festival co-directors Dolina Wehipeihana and Tama Waipara urged him to reconsider that he reopened the script.
“I read it and went, ‘Oh wow. This is still talking about things that are affecting us today.’”
Set on a South Island beach in 1965, Waiora follows a Māori whānau who have left their East Coast tribal homeland for work at a timber mill. Gathering to celebrate 18-year-old Rongo’s birthday – and anticipating a long-awaited promotion for patriarch Hone – the family instead confronts racism, assimilation pressures and fractures within their own relationships.
Kouka has often described it as an immigrant story.
“Unfortunately, the immigrants in the play are Māori, displaced in their own country.”
The narrative draws on his family’s experience during the Māori urban drift. His father moved south to run a sawmill in the Catlins; his mother arrived with the children to what she later described as another planet – a shift from a deeply Māori community to life as a visible minority.
“You leave your safety net. Your community. Your identity. That creates tension.”
Though grounded in Māori experience, Kouka believes the themes resonate far beyond it.
“You could come from Bangladesh and have the same pressures: don’t speak your language, don’t eat that food. We’ve got to assimilate.”
Structurally, the domestic drama was influenced by Death of a Salesman, which Kouka read 16 times before writing his own.
“I needed something rock solid. It’s a family story. Everyone has ruptures with their own whānau.”
When Waiora first toured, responses were visceral. In Hawaii, 800 people stood chanting in Hawaiian for 15 minutes. In Brighton, what initially felt like a muted British reaction became a prolonged standing ovation.
At home, reactions were more complex. Some Pākehā audience members bristled at its blunt portrayal of racism; some Māori viewers felt exposed. Kouka welcomed that tension.
“If it’s soft all the time, it’s just entertainment. This thing ain’t soft.”
He remembers Māori men in Whakatāne openly sobbing after a performance. His mother leaned over and told him, “This works, boy. It’s good.”
This revival carries personal resonance. In the original production, a lead role was performed by the late Nancy Brunning, a major figure in New Zealand theatre and television and Kouka’s former partner. Their daughter, musician Mā, now returns as sound designer.
The intergenerational thread extends beyond his own family. One member of the tīpuna chorus appeared in the original staging 30 years ago; at the other end of the cast is a 19-year-old in her first professional role. One of the set builders was once a baby carried on the Hawaii tour.
For Kouka, that balance feels deliberate. “Art is about balance.”
He insists this is not a heritage restaging. Though set in the 1960s, the politics and language remain intact. Historical distance, he suggests, allows audiences to detach at first, before recognising familiar patterns.
“You go, ‘Oh, that’s not me.’ And then, hold on, I’ve seen that today.”
He briefly considered rewriting sections, worried they might feel dated. Rereading convinced him otherwise.
“Nope. It stands.”
Music and haka are now fully integrated into the narrative rather than serving as decoration. The company includes leading exponents of kapa haka, lifting the performance standard across the board.
“If you have absolute excellence, you’ll go somewhere you’ve never been before.”
Asked what message the play carries now, Kouka pauses.
“Love your family. Love your whānau. You’ll have tensions. But communicate. The world at the moment – people are talking past, over, through each other. Just take a moment and listen.”
He hopes audiences feel unsettled.
“Ask yourself, why do I feel this way?”
Revisiting Waiora is both artistic and deeply personal. The characters bear his siblings’ names; the father is shaped by his own. Writing it helped him process grief. Staging it again reopens that space.
“I cry heaps,” he admits. But the prevailing emotion is aroha, an intensity of love.
Thirty years on, Waiora Te Ūkaipō – The Homeland returns not as a relic but as a living work: expansive, confrontational and tender. A story of displacement that, in coming home again, feels urgently present.
Waiora Te Ūkaipō – The Homeland is staged at the Opera House, Wellington (February 27-March 1) as part of the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts, and at ASB Waterfront Theatre (March 10-15) for the Auckland Arts Festival.