I must have scraped the edge of Upper Hutt’s Timberlea many times, driving up or down State Highway 2, but I’ve never ventured into the suburb itself. The Google Map reveals it is mostly dead-ends with a few loop-streets and fewer through-roads – which seems about right for the Timberlea evoked in Riverside Kings by Natano Keni (also the director) and Sarita So (also the producer).

Keni’s programme note reveals the play has evolved from a monologue he (an actor) was invited by Miria George to write, during the Matariki Development Festival 2015. He describes it as his “homage to the place of my childhood, to brothers and my love for sport, particularly boxing, and how sport can be a metaphor for life: there is no one way about it, no right or wrong, there are greats and there are journeymen; in life we win, we lose and we can always be redeemed.”

This project is a first for I Ken So productions and it’s a gem, dancing tantalisingly around the real issue and thereby increasing our desire for discovery. It has the dramatic structure of a boxing match, ensuring we enjoy the feinting and footwork even though we know there is damage afoot, both in the past and possibly in the immediate future. There is also redemption (which I don’t see as central to boxing).

If, like me, you abhor boxing as a so-called sport, don’t worry, it’s very much a metaphor here; “Always protect the house” being the main imperative. The canvas fans want to see boxers fall to, unconscious, is hung to make walls in Tony De Goldi’s clever set, and two punch bags hang in front of one. White river stones line the front of the stage. There’s a slab of roofing iron too. And a small box, the significance of which is only revealed very late in the game.

Glenn Ashworth’s lighting design manifests heat at the right moments and Karnan Saba’s impactful sound design ranges from childhood prayers to punch-packing gunshots and a squealing pig. With spot-on technical operation by Giovanni Maule, the design elements contextualise the characters and their unfolding stories.

As a prologue, the airborne prayers and sound of a travelling train accompany a man’s shadow-boxing. We will come to know him as Peni Tala, a boxed-in man if ever there was one, played with magnetic minimalism by Semu Filipo.

While preparing to lay down an umu, Salaki Tala, the self-styled “contender from Timberlea”, energetically played by Lale (Joseph) Ausage, fantasises about his ‘Main Event’ fight with no less than Mohammed Ali – until Peni turns up. Peni’s failure to reciprocate his brother’s enthusiastic embrace sets up the mystery we want to see solved, especially when it emerges his brother got him back for Christmas, from Australia, under false pretences.  

The business of getting the umu ready – collecting the stones and the wood, not to mention the pig – gives the action its forward momentum (This is what’s known in the trade as a ‘MacGuffin’: a plot device in the form of some motivator that the protagonists pursue, often with little or no narrative explanation and typically unimportant to the story’s true purpose).

As what is avoided in the awkward brotherly relationship tantalises us further, two more characters join in: the happy-go-lucky Elvis (Ausage) and ciggie-sucking Amo (Filipo); both well-grounded and relatively comical contrasts to The tala brothers. Women are referred to but never seen; this is about the boys.

Recollections of their idyllic childhood vie with the harder realities of their adult lives to deepen our interest and understanding. And the particularities of Samoan culture in Kiwi Timberlea resonate into the commonalities of human existence we’ve all experienced.

There’s fun to be had with a motor mower and sweet singalong once the umu is cooking, but we know in our bones there is more to this play than that.

Our growing interest in what has ‘boxed in’ Peni turns towards someone called Magi (pronounced Mungi) as he begins to loom large in their mythology. So does a place called ‘Paradise’: an island in the river where teenagers do what teenagers do. I’ll say no more, except that there’s more than one way to box a story and here it is cleverly done.

There are insightful inversions in Riverside Kings: the way anger turns out to mask guilt; the way a poetically-expressed reverie gives us access, finally, to the trauma that cracks the mystery. It’s writing like this that allows the undoubted talents of Filipo (fresh from playing “a cynically jocular Benedick” at the Pop-Up Globe, no less) and Ausage (in his first professional role) to shine, given judicious directing from Kani.

It is thanks to Tawata Productions, the Matariki Development Festival and the Kia Mau Festival, all helmed by Hone Kouka and Miria George, that plays like Riverside Kings are allowed to come into being. Everyone involved deserves our gratitude as well as our congratulations. 

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