Auckland Theatre Company’s adaptation of Sia Figiel’s acclaimed novel takes us on a roller-coaster ride through Samoan village life in the 1970s.

It’s a thrilling journey full of laughter and emotional jolts as fragments of Western pop culture collide with the rigid authoritarianism of village tradition and sparks from a mythopoetic past are swamped by a rising tide of consumerism. [More] 

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The stage is set up in the middle of the theatre with tiered seating on both sides so that, some of the time, the actors are speaking with their backs turned and the dialogue is difficult to make out. This makes the story hard to follow at times – also attributable to strong Samoan accents. Drumming accompanies some of the dialogue in the opening scenes, which doesn’t help with audibility either.

The purpose of this set-up seems to be to instil a feeling of being huddled round the ‘storyteller’, however it’s at the cost of effectively conveying the story itself.

The tradition of storytelling is a distinct thread that runs through the play, opening with a creation myth to which Alofa, the central character, listens intently, before launching into her own narrative. Joy Vaele is the clearest speaker – which is fortunate because she plays Alofa who narrates, as the play unfolds, the story of her mother (also played by Vaele) and her own story growing up.

Alofa is born into a family that is ashamed of both her and her mother. Having conceived Alofa during a brief visit to her mother’s village, Alofa’s father, Filiga (Robbie Magasiva), takes them in without question when they arrive on his doorstep, unceremoniously kicking out his first wife. Alofa grows up idolising her father (he’s part of her personal holy trinity, after Jesus Christ and Bruce Lee), despite his repeated indiscretions. In her debut performance with Auckland Theatre Company, Vaele shines, powerfully reeling out the story with directness and heart.

Anapela Polataivao is hilarious as always, as Alofa’s grandmother, her classmate, and her teacher. The rest of the cast (Goretti Chadwick, Robbie Magasiva and Pua Magasiva) give similarly convincing and heartfelt performances.

The actors, dressed simply in identical white t-shirts and pale blue patterned lava-lavas, each play a range of different characters, including children and elders, and it’s hard to distinguish them partly because I missed some key bits of dialogue and partly because if you don’t catch their names the first time it’s hard to tell who’s who; I gave up trying to remember the names of all but the key characters, and found myself playing at guessing who was who’s auntie and which character an actor had suddenly slipped into. Perhaps a family tree accompanying the programme would smooth the way!

Despite intermittent moments of confusion, this is a punchy story and snapshot of 1970s village life in Samoa – at school, at home, and hiding in the bushes on the way between one and the other. There are numerous scenes of hilarity, from schoolgirls re-enacting Charlie’s Angels and discussing frankly amongst themselves their responses to a porn magazine they weren’t supposed to find, to the village priest’s fatalistic predictions for those who will not repent, and unsympathetic school teacher Mrs Samasoni’s classroom diatribes.

Thoroughly entertaining, it is also a significant and candid depiction of the conflicts between genders, generations and cultures.

The near absence of props makes way for frequent and beautifully executed miming – consistent with the simplicity of the overall style of the production. There is one recurring prop – the jandal, used for everything except footwear, from percussion to punishment. An unobtrusive perspex set allows the actors to dominate – and they do, all are impressive and in-your-face, lit in startlingly bright white light.

In fact the only time the theatre is too dark to perve at the programme is right at the end when there are a few moments of utter darkness, bringing the story to a close. The white light is referenced in one of Alofa’s lines: "We live in light." Though I’m not sure of the significance of this…

Where We Once Belonged is bloody funny (though you have to strain to catch all of the jokes). It’s also an unabashed and moving tale about the discomfort of change, not just for a growing girl but for a recently independent Samoa awkwardly deciphering the influence of Western culture, simultaneously rejecting and embracing it, whether negative or positive, whilst struggling to uphold the idea that, "there is no ‘I’, only ‘we’."

Alofa explores the traditions, misconceptions and her own feelings surrounding womanhood. With several of the women in her family having tragic tales, she eventually finds, through the trials and tribulations of adolescence, that she has a choice in the matter. There is an ‘I’, after all.

The Friday night preview weighed in at 105 minutes, 15 minutes longer the time stated in the programme (which is curious because according to John’s review of the Wellington season (10th March) it played 10 minutes shorter than advertised…?). At any rate, it wouldn’t pay to be inflexible about what time you need to be out of the theatre!

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About 12 years ago writer Sia Figiel pushed past the chocolate box prettiness of Samoa, past the Western stereotypes, in her award winning book Where We Once Belonged.  Twelve years, but still it is as striking and as relevant, and in adapting the book for the stage Dave Armstrong has preserved the freshness of the writing and its unconventional style – Figiel’s voice is very much here.

We follow the life of our narrator, Alofa (Joy Vaele), including her conception when her 18 year old mother Pisa sleeps with her father and eventually replaces his wife in his family home. Pisa is never accepted by the family. 

Alofa, too, faces a hard life but adores her father, despite his betrayal.  Children live in paradise yet face a hard life in 1970s Samoa, where to beat your child is to show them ultimate love through discipline. Here there is no ‘I’, only ‘we’.

This is gorgeous ensemble work by the cast (Vaele, Goretti Chadwick, Anapela Polataivao Pua Magasiva and Robbie Magasiva, and it’s directed with verve and charm by Colin McColl and David Fane.

It’s a dazzling set too, designed by artist Michael Tuffery and suffused in white light – picking up on the line from the play "We live in light".  Jandals are a motif – a weapon, a punishment, a drumstick.

This is a highly polished production of an important and heartfelt work.
 

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The title of Sia Figiel’s novel and Dave Armstrong’s lively, free-flowing, hard-hitting adaptation of it for the stage says it all. Where We Once Belonged is both a recollection of a coming of age story of a teenage girl in a small Samoan village in the 1970s and a bitter sweet account of the Canute-like upholders of the traditional ways of life attempting to prevent the waves of change crashing on the shore.

On Michael Tuffery’s minimalist, endlessly adaptable, and after awhile almost invisible Perspex setting of a skeleton of a traditional house which has the audience seated on either side of the Perspex stage, five actors, using a few props and numerous black jandals for sound effects and missiles, tell Alofa’s story.

After a brief prologue of Samoan mythology, a snapshot of the market and village life and local gossip Alofa’s life is explored in flashbacks. Alofa and her friends are constantly put under pressure to conform, to be Samoan, and their natural exuberance is curtailed at almost every turn by family, church and school.

When her father, one of the trinity of the men she most admires (Jesus Christ and Bruce Lee are the other two), is discovered in flagrante delicto with a woman not her mother by Alofa, who returns one day unexpectedly from school, her life changes; adulthood looms.

There are some hilarious sequences: The Prodigal Son as performed by the youngsters of the church, scenes in the classrooms of the ineffectual American Peace Corps teacher Miss Cunningham, and Charlie’s Angels as seen through the eyes of three Samoan girls.

There are sharply focused dramatic scenes: brief moments of family violence, a Cassandra-like prediction of the consequences of Western civilization on the Samoan way-of-life, and the classroom of the frighteningly authoritarian teacher Mrs. Samsoni whom the children eventually prefer to the well-meaning Miss Cunningham.

One of the most telling moments is when the children try to explain to Miss Cunningham that what each person writes is just the same as what the others write because ‘I is always We.’ When I is not always We there lies the new world and not where we once belonged.

Colin McColl and David Fane’s production moves smoothly and vibrantly through its 90 minutes. Though it must be said that the use of a transverse stage has not assisted audibility; too many words and sometimes key parts of a humorous sequence were lost because either the actor had his or her back to part of the audience or because they were being spoken too fast.

However, Goretti Chadwick, Pua Magasiva, Robbie Magasiva, and Anapela Polataivao bring enormous vitality and warmth to their quick characterizations of family, village gossips, school children, adults, and mythological gods. Joy Vaele provides a touching sincerity and an emotional force that exposes Alofa’s vulnerability as well as her inner strength.

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Margaret Mead popularised the topic with Coming of Age in Samoa, but Sia Figiel’s Where We Once Belonged (winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in the South East Asia / South Pacific region) paints a very different picture. It lifts the idyllic Pacific Paradise palm frond to expose something quite other, with all the intensity and humour of a bourgeoning adolescent awareness.

For those wishing to reference the known, it could be described as a Samoan female The God Boy meets The Vagina Monologues via Puberty Blues. But really it is its own honest insight into a culture that may or may not have moved on since the 1970s, when it is set.

The "where" of the title is as much the era and prevailing mind-sets, as the location: Western Samoa, at a time when ‘progress’ has brought the likes of TV and pornographic magazines to Apia, and now they are infiltrating the fictitious nearby village of Malaefou. Of course Christianity has long since made its mark, and whether the strict regimes enforced in its name were already entrenched in fa’a Samoa (the Samoan way), or the church and its dictates are to be blamed for distorting once good social values, I do not know [those who do, please enlighten us via Comments].

I take it the experiences of 13 year-old Alofa Filiga are not to be seen as unusual; that it is a fiction fabricated – by Samoa’s first acknowledged woman novelist (also a performance poet) – to exemplify the generation gap, gender inequalities and cultural divides that prevailed in the 1970s.

Now, as dramatised by Dave Armstrong from Figiel’s novel, Where We Once Belonged adds an important dimension to the work of The Naked Samoans, Pacific Underground before them, and playwrights Dianna Fuemana, Makerita Urale and Tusiata Avia, because it dares to bring a female perspective to the issues of male dominance, moral hypocrisy, violence as a means of discipline, and individual-versus-community.

The traditional form of storytelling, in the fale with villagers sitting around the space, has informed this adaptation and production, co-directed by Colin McColl and David Fane in designer Michael Tuffery’s traverse setting of perspex: a long translucent performance platform, transparent seats that double as drums when slapped with jandals, a transparent ribbed evocation of a huge palm frond that forms a curved canopy – all lit in Pacific white light by Tony Rabbit.

This is a story with nowhere to hide. It demands to be heard, especially as told by a dynamic ensemble of five actors playing multiple roles with energy, humour and grace.

From the creation myth that launches the storytelling to the image of a woman cast adrift at the end, the quest is for a centre of being, first for Samoa, then for oneself. And at the play’s centre, Alofa – played with wide-eyed spirit and clarity by Joy Vaele – is experiencing feelings at the centre of her being that are simultaneously wondrous and dangerous.

Her father, Filiga (a powerful presence in the frame of Robbie Magasiva) is the centre of his own universe. Even though he threw out one wife to take in a pregnant other – Alofa’s mother (also played by Vaele) – she grows up to revere him alongside Jesus Christ and Bruce Lee.

School is cool with friends like Lili (Goretti Chadwick) and Moa (Anapela Polataivao), who share Alofa’s growing interest in the mysteries of adult life. Then there are the boys. Sisifo (Robbie M) is a bit of a sook but the minister’s much more worldly-wise son Lealofi (Pua Magasiva) is a dreamboat, with an insistent mast at his centre.

As for the teachers: comedy arises from Chadwick’s American Peace Corps volunteer, Mrs Cunningham, failing to comprehend the inability of the Samoan ‘we’ to experience life as the western ‘I’, while Polataivao’s fearsome bully Mrs Samasoni – the sort who scrapes nail polish off with a razor blade – epitomises educational principles we all hope have been well and truly superseded. But even the likes of Mrs S can surprise us …

With the advent of TV – Filiga is the first in the village to get one – notions of womanhood and femininity get a makeover, thanks to The Bionic Woman and Charlie’s Angels. These are the things which Siniva (Chadwick), described in the programme as "the blind village fool", rages against as examples of how western so-called-civilisation is destroying Samoa’s so-called innocence.

I confess to some confusion here: is Siniva the woman – also played by Chadwick – who won a scholarship to study in NZ and came back with an MA? If so, the means by which she transformed into "the blind village fool" escaped me, and given the importance this character has at the end, this confusion is unfortunate.

Spoiler warning (although I will be circumspect):
With all the themes and plot-lines set, everything comes to a head one storm-soaked afternoon – wonderfully evoked in John Gibson’s sound design – when Alofa, feeling ill and heading home from school early, walks in on her father … I won’t specify what she sees; let’s just call the experience loss of innocence by proxy and total loss of faith in him. And this time, I’m side-tracked by a credibility question: did this happen at the Filiga home? If so, how come? Didn’t the woman involved know Alofa was heading home early that afternoon? If not, the exact whereabouts of the encounter needs to be made clearer.
Spoiler warning ends.

Cleverly placed for comic relief while teasing out the increasing complex question of what is good or bad, right or wrong, the children enact the parable of the Prodigal Son as their traditional White Sunday performance.

In order to attend Samoa College, Filiga sends Alofa to live with her extended family; the aiga, whose core role is to protect and punish: her stern, no-nonsense grandmother, Tausi (Polataivao) and stuttering yet controlling Uncle Asu (Pua M), who slides with disconcerting ease from apparent fool to malevolent disciplinarian.

While physical maturation proceeds apace, innocence remains, as in not really knowing the difference between an economist and a communist when it comes to the palagi Mr Brown, for whom Lily cleans and who turns out to have a ‘dirty magazine’ hidden away where they shouldn’t have been looking. Shock, awe, fascination …

So it comes to pass that when Lealofi starts taking an interest, or taking advantage of Alofa’s crush on him, she is more inclined to broaden her experience first hand than run away. But someone in the community sees and the aiga must act – against the girl, of course. (He may be the minister’s son but boys will be boys …)

And the father does what’s expected of him. "Even when he was hitting me, he couldn’t look me in the eye," says Alofa. "When he was punishing me, he was punishing himself."

What with speedy deliveries (it played 10 minutes shorter than advertised), Samoan accents interlaced with Samoan language, and a setting that meant actors often had their backs to us, I can’t say I ‘got’ everything. But I did feel I’d been fully immersed in a cultural experience that broadened my understanding of what has become an indelible part of our own social fabric. And I certainly felt entertained in the best sense of the term.

More important is the challenge Where We Once Belonged offers in confronting social value systems that persist in some quarters, and that certain factions would like to see prevail once more. It’s a classic case of recalling recent history in order to be sure we don’t repeat it.

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