Well Wellington, let’s talk about earthquakes. You know you want to because you’re sitting on 75 km of a long curved fault spanning from the city centre to the Hutt. You know this. And that it’s capable of producing earthquakes of around magnitude-8 in the next 500 years. Speaking of which …

It’s been 89 years since the 1931 Napier Earthquake, and Echo Theatre NZ isn’t about to let us sweep this momentous experience under the rug. Jacob Cleghorn’s play Fracture is based on Dame Gaylene Preston’s documentary ‘Survivor Stories’ produced in 1998. The movie focuses on four interviews with survivors of the earthquake, and can be seen on screens on repeat at MTG, Hawkes Bay’s award-winning museum.

For those of you unfamiliar with the backstory, New Zealand changed in an instant on February 3^rd 1931 at 10:47am when a massive quake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale struck the region of Hawkes Bay. An ideal play for theatre goers interested in New Zealand history, Fracture is a composite of five individual’s personal stories of their experiences during and after the Big One. The actors are able to capture what happened on that day by weaving monologues with physical theatre and radio broadcasts.

Having lived through the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011, I have to admit I am a little more than apprehensive going in. To be honest, I hate the earthquake house in Te Papa that mimics the Napier earthquake. That trauma is not something I want to relive and I am worried about how Echo Theatre NZ will navigate the space between sharing traumatic stories without traumatising its audience.

The actors are already sitting on stage amidst prop rubble when I enter, which feels odd. Perhaps their intention is to mimic that eerie stillness that precedes a big earthquake, before the “world comes at you”, if I can steal a repeated line from one of the characters.

The play starts with each character describing how the day felt before the earthquake hit. The weather was muggy and oppressive. There was a curious feeling in the air. Friends were at the beach, relaxing, when waves kicked up. But even with the white caps, the descriptions of idyllic weather (sans wind!) lull the audience into a sense of calmness. I am expecting them to re-enact the event itself, but they spare us the drama – perhaps to its detriment.

The use of the curtain to introduce shadow play is an interesting prop that ultimately takes away from the narratives of the characters. We don’t need the puppetry, after all, we’re here for the personal stories, so it’d be nice to see the characters’ expressions when they describe, say, their tech block crumbling to the ground and taking over 20 pupils with it.

Thankfully, it’s not all doom and gloom. The juxtaposition with the radio broadcasts, which deliver information on what happened on that day in a more removed, matter of fact way, is a good respite from the emotional (albeit somewhat reserved) monologues. There is a lot of physicality on stage with white sheets – who knew you could do so much with a sheet? They’re used as sheaths for the dead, reins for unruly cows who sense the movement of the earth, feral waves and much more. Maybe too much more.

How does a fledgling theatre company impart the enormousness of an event like this on an audience who perhaps have never been through anything like it? By focusing on the words I think, and leaving the sheets, curtains, and banging of fists on corrugated metal for someone else. At the end, there is a heart string pulling song about never forgetting the ordeal and never getting over it. It’s a grim note, this idea that people won’t get over such a devastating event, and one that I can personally challenge. People are resilient. We can get over most things. One thing I do agree with is living in fear of another big one.

The karakia helps to instil a bit of hope, but the play could do with more. While Facture is a moving play about living through traumatic events, I leave wondering what the take away is from this narrative. It’s all well and good to relive events from the past, but what’s the lesson? It is lacking.

The end of the play is interesting in that the actors tell the audience how and why they came to participate. They each talk about their relationship to Napier, or their lack of relationship (shout out to the actor from Cardiff), and they tell us which real people they played. Is it necessary? Not really. It would be enough to see the real life person projected behind each actor.

The best part of the evening is Dame Gaylene herself being identified in the audience. She is very moved to see such a young cast play the older people she interviewed 22 years ago. She says the actors have brought these people and their personal stories to life, which is true: they have done that, briefly.

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