The questing traveller who becomes lost and finds what they are looking for (their self) when they return home has been a classic plotline since Homer wrote The Odyssey. Among many others, Ibsen picked it up in the 1860s with Peer Gynt. And didn’t Gurdjieff explore the syndrome too, early last century, and become a counter-culture icon in the 1960s? It’s the ‘voyage and return’ story, named by Christopher Booker as one of the seven basic plots.  

Beneath Skin and Bone offers a relatively intimate, culturally unique and fresh variation on the theme by manifesting the subjective experience of 25 year-old Poto Manawa. She is not so much a questing traveller as someone who has followed her mother to the city, is alone in their apartment and is feeling lost. Not that she admits it; she doesn’t need to call her Nan …  

Trae Te Wiki, who is also the writer, communicates Poto’s feelings and concerns with subtle skill, as often as not non-verbally. It’s a state-of-being most people will recognise. Hanging her name on the wall and putting up photos may help her feel at home. But it’s the call to attend a whanau hui tomorrow, because Uncle Riki is coming home, that prompts unbidden memories, sends her crawling under something into somewhere, searching …

And where do those spooky noises come from? Composer and musician Reuben Butler contributes a remarkable soundscape. His metatheatrical presence live on stage generates possibly unintended comedy when she can’t find the source of the sounds but there is a lightness of touch and a knowingness in the presentation that does not detract from the content. Does she take control of it or is the universe playing with her? Such metaphysical conundrums simmer throughout the play.  

Andrew Brown’s two-screen and scrim back-drop set design allows for shadow-play fringed with toe-toe and harakeke, strongly evoking the hapu’s homeland. Mostly it’s used for the episodic reading of a story about the kaitiaki of the forest which, this opening night, is a little hard to hear clearly.

The transition to Poto’s subjective reality becomes fully apparent with the arrival of Paia, a patupaiarehe whose status and confidence yet playful spirit is winningly captured by Tial Te Wiki (Trae’s 11 year-old sister); she dances beautifully too.  

As their trip through mythology and memory proceeds, including to a karaoke bar, Poto has to tread a fine line between her reality and the ‘real’ world: another source of comedy. References to pollution allow the play to resonate in a wider context. And the issue of whether Poto can sing, having been shut down at an early age, is resolved with allegorical implications.

Director Neenah Dekkers-Reihana presides over an intriguing creative collaboration that is entertainingly elusive, illusive and allusive in dramatising a level of truth we can all relate to. 

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