We enter The Dome at Bats to a recording of native birdsong in the bush.  Silently populating the stage, the birds are perched on or around two wooden ladders and a thick plank.  

Roger Sanders’ Tui Tata, all jerky head movements and curious neck-jerks, reminds me of Mr Collins (from whichever film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice you most prefer), right down to the buck-teeth collar over the black waistcoat.  Bridget Sanders’s Ruru is similarly period-dressed, in a brown shawl and grey apron, sitting high on her ladder and surveying the room. Up front stands Lisa Allan’s gracefully still Heron, staring out into the middle distance and looking slightly out-of-time in her grey peplum top, but all together, the first image sets up the expectation that we’re going to enter a story about colonization in the 1840s to 1860s.

Instead, Birdlife revolves around young half-British, half-Maori Hine and her parents, who emigrate from England to NZ in the 1960s to care for Hine’s Granddad.  Following her Granddad’s death by heart attack, Hine starts to both call upon and fear the birds who “carried him away”.  Her fear sparks mischief in Tui and stern disapproval from ponderous Ruru.  Somehow – and I am really not clear at all on how – she calls out to the birds to take her, too, and gets transformed into a Grey-Faced Heron. 

The whole thing has a fairy-tale aspect to it; a sense of simplicity and inevitability.  The vocabulary is simple, direct address exposition is frequent.  Book-ending the evening is a short karakia and an address from Heron, who speaks in short rhymed couplets reminiscent of children’s bedtime stories. 

Each human character is partnered with an avian counterpart: Hine and her Grey-Faced Heron, Hine’s anxious Mum and the grave Ruru, Hine’s compassionate Dad and mischievous Tui Tata, and even the (unseen) sage Granddad and puppets of the flittery Piwakawaka/Fantail and remote Albatross. 

Ruru and Tui Tata comment on the plot – in oddly formal accents that I can’t quite place as either Received Pronunciation or the old-fashioned white Kiwi from when schools taught elocution and ‘The Queen’s English’ – without taking much action to influence the events of the play.  It’s weird that the distinctly New Zealand birds are so British in their voices and their costumes, given the show’s dedication to telling a Kiwi story and bi-racial main character. 

The choice of Piwakawaka and Albatross emphasizes the importance of Granddad’s death to the story. Both birds are tied to death in folklore (“Fantail inside, someone has died” and the legend that albatrosses are the souls of sailors lost at sea). Their appearance is always significant, but the puppets themselves are quite limited, meaning their operation distracts from the moment of the play rather than adding.  Each puppet is restricted to one point of articulation, limiting its ability to mimic the range of bird movement. 

The design forces the actors to rely on similar movements over and over again, like Albatross’s constantly pumping wings – an odd feature to accentuate on a primarily gliding bird – and I spend more time trying to work out the puppet’s design and operation than paying attention to the action (which might be why I have no idea why Hine becomes a Heron, now that I think of it). 

The human events play out on a surface level and without much in the way of contrast. Young Hine is literally all smiles and stompy feet, even when we’re told in the direct address that she doesn’t particularly like what she’s doing.  This sets up a strong contrast for her deepening sadness after the death of her Grandpa, when Allan seems to curl in on herself, all hunched shoulders and indirect eye contact, but her choice comes at the expense of complex characterisation.  It’s the characterisation version of a McDonald’s cheeseburger: it’ll do, but you can probably find something with more flavours. 

The production uses a huge variety of performance tactics including naturalistic conversation, (very breathy) song, dance, poetry, puppetry and physical performance tasks.  They all play out for the same amount of time, regardless of the payoff at the end of that time or the fundamental draw of that performance style.  It leaves some bits feeling overly long (the dialogues between the birds spring to mind) while others seem too short, such as when Hine runs around the stage, ‘frantically’ racing to reach her house. 

The draw of a physical challenge like that onstage is watching the actor struggling for real.  While Allan does a few laps around the stage and then acts ‘tiredness’, forcing Allan to run longer would let us experience her desperation as the actress actually gets tired. As it is, the middling length of time feels too long to be interesting as a bit of naturalism and too short to be interesting as a bit of physical theatre. 

I’m left craving a real acting challenge all the way through the show.  Images, like the boat sail created from a wool blanket, are often available for a similarly measured period. 

This calculated pacing contributes greatly to the show’s sense of inevitability.  While Julian Raphael plays an utterly charming live music score underneath the action – a welcome addition to a Fringe where sound designs have been decidedly lacking – the cumulative effect is still one of stasis rather than change.  

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer