Meet the whanau in Black Ties (Tainui Tukiwaho is far left). Photo / Luke Currie Richardson
Indigenous sovereignty, laughter, family feuds and all the guilty pleasures of a classic romantic comedy, Black Ties is an invitation to one of the most awkward wedding receptions you'll ever attend.
It's a collaboration between the Australian state of Victoria's Ilbijerri and Auckland Te Rēhia and has been billed as
the world's first Māori/Aboriginal romantic comedy for the stage.
So, there's a wildly inappropriate mother preparing a welcome for her son's Māori-Polynesian girlfriend, an indescribably chaotic pōwhiri featuring jandals and a broom, a Māori–Aboriginal sing off, a subtle but clear snub to the Union Jack and a couple of racists jokes that had me falling off my chair at the kind of comedy only first nations people can deliver.
The drama gives us characters we all know and love, but from an indigenous lens. We get a chance to see ourselves and our whanau as archetypes rather than as caricatured stereotypes.
Tainui Tukiwaho, plays the father of the bride as a loveable rogue, and inhabits the role with an ease that makes everything he did seem like a spontaneous improvisation; Jack Charles' shines at the wedding reception, emphasising the mana of elders in first nations communities.
