With more attention to detail Te Kaupoi could actually stand as a highly innovative contribution to race politics in our society. My hope is that my brief comments can support another great aspiration to tell Maori stories. I say with regards to what is already there, turn the heat up on the Maori politics, dive deeper into the Maori psyche and this compelling play will go off.
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New Zealand has become a police state with no freedom of speech or elections, as virtual war has been declared by the Government against Maori activists. This is excitingly – possibly dangerous – inflammatory material, refreshingly original and daring for homegrown theatre.

Wellington playwright Whiti Hereaka damps down any incendiary political controversy – grievances mentioned are mostly imaginary, future ones – and her provocative scenario becomes the backdrop to more personal drama. Tongariro hosts a terrorist prison, "status cards" get you important privileges – a few more such brutal details of the repressive regime would have been fun, but no matter.

Instead, Te Kaupoi is about the opposing loyalties of being a protester: how can one juggle the conflicting claims of one’s lover, mother, son and movement? [More]
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This production feels like a flashback to the best years of Taki Rua, when we were regularly treated to gutsy, meaningful and unashamedly political Maori plays.

Whiti Hereaka integrates the recent so called NZ terror raids, the tendency towards rushing in legislation based on whipped up public panic and talk of abolishing the Maori parliamentary seats in a world set only slightly in the future.
Here Maori who don’t qualify for “status cards” may have their ancestral land back, but are starving. A resistance movement uses often-violent protest methods against the government while at the same time the mysterious Te Kaupoi, a prophet like figure uses radio broadcasts to gather his disenfranchised people to his cause.

Jason te Kare plays Te Kaupoi, brought up to be a prophet and beacon for Maori, as a man with tremendous charisma and emotional frailty, both in equal measure. He is tired of hiding and being starved of food and of company, having only his staunch gun toting mother and the occasional rodeo meeting to ease the isolation.

The arrival of an injured young woman, Sarah, kicks up all kinds of other emotions for both the cowboy and his mother. All three must eventually make choices with far reaching consequences.

It’s hard to believe that Kay Smith who plays the visitor/intruder Sarah, is just a few months out of Toi Whakaari. This is an assured performance, and the chemistry with Te Kare is blistering. Tina Cook as Te Kaupoi’s controlling mother Mere hits the right note as nurturer and jailer.

Hereaka’s writing is so taut and the performances so intense that the 90 minutes running time flies by.

Other writers would need twice as long to pack in half as much content and feeling. Nancy Brunning’s direction is pitch perfect, getting the maximum from her cast of three and the tiny Bats stage.
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Te Kaupoi, Whiti Hereaka’s fourth play, is set in ‘the not too distant future,’ in an Aotearoa New Zealand beset with internal terrorism.

The abolition of the Mâori seats led to the unrest, and Mâori who protested against this have been driven underground. These include Mere (Mary) Edwards, played by Tina Cook (in her first Bats appearance for 19 years), living in a remote rural area north of Taupo. Mere’s son, Zeke Edwards (Jason Te Kare) lives nearby, when he’s not taking part in rodeo competitions around the country. 

As the play begins, Sarah Smith (Kay Smith) arrives, battered and bleeding, and is befriended by Mere and Zeke. Gradually, details about Sarah’s identity and how she came to be there emerge. It’s difficult to reveal more without giving away the plot, but newcomer Smith ably portrays the enigmatic Sarah.

We also hear from Te Kaupoi (‘The Cowboy’), a protester responsible for pirate radio broadcasts urging Mâori to unite and fight the restrictive government measures. Te Kaupoi’s broadcasts cut into a chilly state-run station ‘Radio 1—for freedom, fraternity, fidelity’. Te Kaupoi responds with his own critique, prefaced with a dystopian reworking of a pepeha (tribal saying):
“I have no mountain, or land—they have been stolen.
 I have no people—they are scattered.
 I was born of slavery and injustice.
 I am the son of everyone and no one.”

Hereaka cites the 2007 so-called ‘terror raids’ as an influence in this play, which also made me think of other times Mâori were regarded as terrorists in their own country, including the New Zealand Wars and the earlier police raids in the Ureweras leading to the arrest of Rua Kenana and his followers.

Te Kaupoi challenges us to consider what the impact might be if, as some do argue, the Mâori seats were to be abolished. More potent perhaps, are the play’s themes centred around Mâori culture, the essence of being Mâori. Navigating the choices inherent in being Mâori is not an easy, straight-forward business. 

Should Mâori culture be shared? There’s a spooky reference to the lists compiled as part of Treaty settlements being used to round people up to be sent to a terrorist detention camp in Tongariro. Could Mâori culture be used as a weapon? After seeing this play, the ubiquitous taonga worn around the necks of many New Zealanders will never look the same again. 

And yet, this play argues, the culture may be inherently resilient. As Te Kaupoi says in his broadcasts, it’s difficult to arrest and ideal or the protest movement. It’s reminiscent of the whakatauki (proverb): e kore au e ngaro, he kakano i ruia mai i Rangiatea (I shall not be lost, the seed that was sown from Rangiatea). 

In this production, the intimate Bats stage is divided into two areas—Mere’s realm on one side and her son’s on the other. All three actors turn in strong performances. The language in Hereaka’s plays is significant and it was frustrating that sometimes her words were lost when actors raised their voices at each other. Quiet, controlled delivery can be more powerful and effective than loud declamation.

But this is a minor quibble in the 90 minute production which managed to maintain the mounting tension, culminating in the startling revelations about Sarah’s raison d’etre.

The blackboard outside Bats Theatre bills Te Kaupoi as ‘The raunchy new political drama in town’. It’s a fair description.

It feels like a long time since we’ve seen Mâori theatre in Wellington. And now we have Te Kaupoi at Bats and a return season of He Reo Aroha at Circa Two [from 16 June, and the next iteration of Mark Twain & Me in Mâoriland at Downstage from 17 July – ed].

This may mean the drought is over, but in case it doesn’t, fans of Mâori theatre should get along and see both productions. Kia kakama e hoa mâ.  
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I saw the second night of Te Kaupoi and feel it is a significant work that needs more room to breathe and ‘be’ in its space, with itself, in order to invite us in.  

Te Kaupoi may look and feel like a Kiwi version of a Sam Shepard play but it’s about much more than the troubled relationships between three people in a remote part of the North Island’s volcanic plateau, two day’s walk from the nearest town.

The entirely credible premise is that in the not too distant future the Mâori seats have been abolished, subsequent protest action has caused widespread civil unrest, the perpetrators have been branded terrorists and civil liberties have been abandoned. So-called ‘terrorists’ can be tried and found guilty without being arrested. Mâori need to achieve ‘status cards’ in order to avoid being suspected terrorists.

It’s a future fashioned from recent events in the Ureweras and geographically placed between memories of Te Kooti and Rua Kenana to the east, and the Pai Marire (aka Hauhau) to the west. Imagine a government led by Michael Laws and it seems more probable than possible.

As a political play Te Kaupoi focuses on the dynamics between activists and idealists, direct actionists and passive resisters, talkers and doers. As a play about humanity its heart is in the space between love and hatred: love of self, whanau, a partner and one’s fellow human being, including strangers; hatred of people and systems that disenfranchise, disempower, displace – and provoke distrust.

What, then, is to be done? And in considering possible answers, who can you trust (as the poster’s slug line puts it)?

Director Nancy Brunning’s programme note speaks of the rituals of encounter and gathering in large groups and asks what would become of Maori culture if they were supplanted by the paranoia that would be engendered by such legislation. This is the bigger picture that radiates from playwright Whiti Hereaka’s particular attention to her three characters.  

The human need for love seethes beneath their flinty surfaces and their contradictory behaviour in seeking it keeps them – and us – guessing as to what exactly is driving them and what the outcome will be. Meanwhile volcanic outbursts keep punctuating any potential for repose.

Mere Edwards (Tina Cook) is no laid back greenie communing with nature as she plants trees for the next generation. She carries a shotgun and lives in fear that ‘they’ will come and ‘get’ her, as they did her activist husband, who was killed during protest action after she left him to return with their son to the old family homestead and more peaceful ways. As a nurse she seems to have acquired some pretty radical drugs and has no time for the niceties of ‘informed consent’ when administering them because she ‘knows best’.

Her son, Zeke (Jason Te Kare), competes on the rodeo circuit to earn them a living and in the hope of getting the Status Card that will allow him more freedom. He blames his mother for leaving his father and not being more assertive in her activism and he fights his very boyish need for love with ‘being the tough man’ stuff.

The wild card thrown into this diminished family set-up is Sarah (Kay Smith), found by Mere, beaten up, semi-conscious and dumped in the bush. Fear and suspicion transcends the natural urge to tend and nurture but Mere does that anyway, albeit by tying her to the bed and administering the aforementioned drugs.

The questions of who Sarah is and how she came to be there keep arising (why would they not?) and I take it that whatever else emerges to be scrutinised for veracity, her sense of abandonment and displacement – because ‘they’ took her mother and imprisoned her when Sarah was very young – is real. Likewise her entrancement at the unconditional love between Mere and Zeke: a state she has never experienced and now desires more than anything.

Given all this, I feel it’s essential that we get some sense of family life in repose, away from ‘the troubles’, and that the growing love between Sarah and Zeke be given the time and space to evolve as a scarily pleasurable contrast to the fear and anxieties that normally pervade their lives.  

At present, because the short scenes, time jumps and ever-present paranoia put pressure on the forward momentum (and throws everyone into ‘when in doubt shout’ mode), the revelation at the end comes over as ‘this was always the case and anything that seems to contradict it was a conscious and deliberate lie.’ That’s why people say the revelations are predicable.  

[To discuss this further may be a spoiler: you have been warned.]

I don’t think it matters that we quickly guess Zeke the rodeo cowboy is also Te Kaupoi on the radio: the rogue broadcaster spreading his subversive message through the ether. Nor does it matter that who Sarah turns out to be has been clearly flagged (that, after all, is a basic rule of ‘who dunnits’ and thrillers).

What matters is how their coming together and experiencing a quality of love neither has known before changes them, fundamentally. Specifically, we need to find Sarah’s pregnancy credible and a manifestation of a whole new realm of possibility.  

If we believe in the truth of this, the outcomes of sudden reversion to type and summary ‘justice’ predicated on who people might have been before rather than who they are now, leave us with much more to chew on that’s directly relevant to the world we are part of today. [Warning ends]

All three actors do a remarkable job of capturing each dimension of their characters in moments of emotional truth that would register strongly on a big screen, supported with visual language and a subtle sound track. More time and space is needed to draw a live theatre audience in; to engage our empathy and compel us to ask what we would do in each changing circumstance.

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Advertised as a politically raunchy drama, the latest production to open at BATS – Te Kaupoi – is all that and more. 

The setting is New Zealand sometime in the future where civil unrest is rife and the country is on the verge of becoming a police state. The government has abolished the Maori seats causing protests and terrorism, stirred up by Te Kaupoi – a DJ on a pirate radio station. In complete contrast to this is the tranquillity of rural headland NZ where tree planting Mere Edwards (Tina Cook) lives with her rodeo cowboy son Zeke (Jason Te Kare). 

Into their midst arrives Sarah (Kay Smith), bloodied and disorientated who nevertheless inveigles her way into their household upsetting the dynamics between mother and son and creating tension and ultimately havoc. 

On one level this is a well constructed and portrayed drama full of intrigue with many twists and turns – is Sarah really who she says she is; what is Zeke’s “little secret”? – while on another level it is about relationships and the clash of ideals when an outside force imposes itself on that of an established family unit. And although the scenario of the play is hypothetical and it would be hoped never arises, there are nevertheless many issues exposed like sovereignty and personnel freedom that surface through the plays many layers that add depth to intrigue of the storyline. 

While the production takes some time to establish itself and the cinematic structure of the many short scenes initially hinders the flow of the production, once the actors settle into their roles the tension develops and it becomes gripping and engaging. 

Jason Te Kare’s makes a good cowboy in his role as Zeke, his inner turmoil obviously seething below the surface until his relationship with Sarah changes everything. 

In the role of Sarah, Kay Smith portrays well the duplicity of her role: contained, controlled and never allowing the real self of the character to be exposed. 

But it is Tina Cook as the mother Mere that steals the show, her honesty and the authenticity of her pain in why she is living in the country and when everything breaks down is real and telling. 

Under the direction of Nancy Brunning this new and highly entertaining play by Whiti Hereaka is full of action with many surprises yet also thought provoking and well worth watching. 
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Te Kaupoi commences with a presentation of diverse images – a backlit rodeo rider, a woman with a kete and a gun, and a young woman lying moaning on the ground after a beating. The clipped voice of the radio news announcer of Radio One, “for freedom, fraternity and fidelity” updates the concerned public on the latest in the battle against Maori terrorists. The woman with the gun finds the beaten woman and takes her in. A long haired cowboy lassoes a metal drum.

It’s rare to see such overtly political home-grown dramas – for this reason, Te Kaupoi is worth seeing, despite its flaws.
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