One enduring childhood memory I have is visiting Nelson’s Isel Park Museum and viewing the ‘Death Masks’ of the infamous Maungatapu Murderers. Delicious chills, ran down my spine. Real dead men and so vile and vicious, naturally the story gripped my imagination. Fast forward several decades and, at last, the story of the Burgess-Kelly gang has been dramatised, warts and all. What a satisfying experience it is.

Maungatapu, written by local playwright and screen writer Justin Eades and directed by Giles Burton, explores the dynamics between gang members Burgess, Kelly, Sullivan and poor unwitting Levy. We are transported back to the rough and ready time of the New Zealand gold rushes. It was a bleak, uncomfortable and hard life and riches could be had if you were lucky, prepared to work or were dishonest.

Burgess and Kelly, recidivist criminals, and their mismatched accomplices, schemed to take the easy road to wealth and unfortunately that road lay over the Maungatapu Track between Pelorus and Nelson. Miners and travellers of the time faced an arduous and – for four businessmen along with a passing flax grower – ultimately fatal, journey in June of 1866. 

The best thing about this play is undoubtedly the storyline. Seeing various perspectives from different times and places resonates with our sense of New Zealand identity.  Hokitika, Westport, Canvastown; the wild west towns of our history. This gruesome crime – our Gunfight at the OK Corral – made news world-wide.

The set is stark and colourless, and it is enough. It is simple and effective. It allows the narrative, shared between the four men, to sweep the audience up. The story of Burgess and how he came to New Zealand, his subsequent exploits and his almost fraternal care of the young and somewhat inadequate Levy, ably played by Nelson actor Pete Coates is compelling. Cameron West is a convincing Richard Burgess: a hard man, certainly a murderer, but with a side that shows he cared for his friends and may even have had the capacity to love.

Not so Joseph Sullivan. Nick Kemplen captures a cold and calculating Sullivan who lived on the outside of society and was happy to be there. He has no empathy, is easy to dislike and kudos to Kemplen for such a sinister portrayal. Thomas Kelly, said to be dragged kicking and screaming to the gallows, is portrayed by Dan Allan. We see a scared and vulnerable man, responsible for introducing the turncoat Sullivan to Burgess, who feels he has a lot of living left to do.

Top marks to the actors. With the haunting continuity music, evocative lighting and seamless scene changes we are not left hanging … unlike the murderers. The audience are appreciative and impressed. They enjoy an insight into the tough male camaraderie of the time which perhaps isn’t so different from today’s.

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Maungatapu, the sacred mountain, better known as the location of the infamous murders, is a tale well-known to Nelsonians. This is just as well because tonight’s performance does little to enhance that story or the lives of the characters involved. I so want to believe in this play but it is not meant to be.

It has a promising start: a stark stage with four wooden benches and suitably gloomy lighting; four suitably attired, bearded men and a narrator to draw us into the story. Unfortunately the play lurches through a series of short scenes punctuated by long darknesses and an interminable number of rearrangements of those benches.

The characters mumble, their voices are lost along with my attention.  I lament the lack of clear diction, the decision to use false accents and the rather shambling movements of what should be four violent, and riveting characters.

Little in the script illuminates the hardship of criminal life in colonial New Zealand or the backgrounds of the four men. None of them earn our empathy. It is difficult to believe that Burgess, the leader, has the necessary ruthlessness to commit such gruesome murders. Cameron West needed to be much nastier and his movements more deliberate.

Dan Allan’s Tommy Kelly is an admirable foil to Burgess as the drunk, snivelling youth but much of his dialogue is lost. Pete Coates, whose role as narrator is crucial to developing the tension, lacks the sharp timing needed to emerge from the darkness, pause and present his perspective. Nick Kemplen, the traitorous Joe Sullivan, does his best but is left floundering at the end in an effort to explain his last years.

This play could have been so good. It’s not often you get the opportunity to see four strong male actors with excellent credentials on the stage together. These characters are not tragic heroes but even as ordinary criminals they fail to capture our interest.

Maybe, at the end of the day, they are just rather forgettable characters caught up in a messy and ugly murder.

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