For better and for worse, The Night Mechanics falls into a category I’d loosely define as protest theatre. It’s unabashedly making a political statement with its message about water consumption and ownership always at the fore. 

While I can’t help but feel the show is crafted and performed exactly the way it wants to be, it simply doesn’t engage me strongly. I think the caveat here is that I look for narrative and characters and this type of expressionist work is something I have difficulty engaging with.

Because the message is being so boldly delivered, it feels like it subsumes the other aspects of the story. The dialogue is poetic, the author’s voice strongly coming through, but this means dialogue is often unnatural and oddly phrased. The characters are archetypes rather than relatable, and most of what we learn of the world comes from exposition. By falling halfway between realism and symbolism, the story feels jarring to me, changing gears too rapidly between the two.

The core premise is familiar yet crafted into an interesting world: a future where water is controlled in the big cities; an iwi trying to recover what they regret having sold away. There’s a lot referred to but we seldom get any depth to references and terms. Likewise the characters never get fleshed out and often seem to be talking past each other with Beckett-like obtuseness.

The protagonists, two sisters, are inconsistent in character; the antagonists are so cartoonishly and openly evil that they are impossible to connect with. Even the title, while referenced, feels like it has little to do with the events unfolding.

It’s a frustrating paradox that by having the message laid on so heavily in everything, the message itself feels less accessible. And there are interesting moral dilemmas that never get deeply explored. When resources are scarce do you help those in need? Do you move to the city or fight to keep your community going? There are so many interesting themes popping up in the play but none of them are explored in any depth.

Actors Amanda Noblett and Raai Badeeu are easily at their strongest when they’re cutting loose in passionate rhetoric but their eventual confrontation is stilted and odd, never reaching any real resolution.

The ideas are important, the passion is genuine and the world has potential but for me there simply is not enough story and character to draw me into the work. 

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The issue of water and water rights has become a major topic in the run-up to the general election, and although Miria George’s new play The Night Mechanics, currently playing early evenings at Bats Theatre, isn’t a political play as such, there is much in it that is relevant to the current discussion on water ownership. 

While the fight for land has been a constant grievance for Maori, and still is, George has moved the debate to water in a very innovative and creatively constructed play that leaves its audience with much food for thought. [More] 

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“No-one owns the water,” some politicians are fond of saying. Except when it’s bottled and sold overseas for profit. And of course responsibility is quickly disowned when our waterways become polluted. Then there are the effects of climate change on this vital resource, be it in the polar icecaps, oceans or weather patterns …  

Mīria George has tapped into this highly topical issue with a poetic play that resonates beyond this one essential resource-cum-commodity. Think back to the dodgy sales and compulsory acquisitions of Māori land; think forward to Monsanto et al’s reputed desire to own the intellectual property rights for all the seed stock that feeds us, modified to be non-regenerating so we have to keep buying new seeds from them even for what we plant in our own gardens.

In The Night Mechanics’ dystopian future, a multinational company has acquired exclusive ownership of the water, so that everyone has to buy what they use. The focus is on a small, landlocked and Māori community, represented by Hine (Carrie Green). Also resident is Zelda (Sarita So), a visitor from a distant island. Outside the marae is Hine’s brother, Manu (Ahi Karunaharan), banished for having given the Company exclusive rights to the hapu’s water.

The Water Company is personified by Darren (Dawn Cheong), a woman masquerading as a man in the minds of those she deals with remotely. She prides herself on being more powerful than the prime minister and is often seen riding high on the shoulders of Father Teal (Natano Keni), which may be seen as an echo of the British colonial government exploiting relationships established by missionaries and/or as reflecting how the church continues to enable global capitalism in the 21^st century.

All five characters are present in their relative isolation as we arrive at the BATS Heyday Dome space. Cara Louise Warateni’s excellent costumes distinguish the rough-clad ‘have nots’ from the spick ’n’ span ‘haves’. A barely distinguishable radio voice is reduced to static (sound design by Karnan Saba), as a supine Hine intones a melancholy song into a megaphone. It’s Zelda who scolds her for wasting the batteries – and then for breaking their water-usage rules …

The intriguingly abstract nature of the staging and the poetic nature of much of the dialogue mean our initial task is to work out who is who, what is what, and why. Given this enquiry is what engages us for most of the hour, I’ll avoid specifics as to what is revealed and how. Suffice to say a land that was once awash with water is now drought-stricken and people-in-need who were once welcomed onto the marae (shades of Te Puea Marae in Mangere) are now shut out, with Manu, stranded in what’s called ‘car city’.

Carrie Green epitomises the reluctant leader, Hine: bathing in her memories of water while resisting the influx of ‘refugees’, against what used to be her compassionate nature … Can she resolve this impasse? If so, how? That we too wrestle from a ‘What would I do?’ perspective enhances our engagement.

Sarito So’s Zelda is also tough when she needs to be but vulnerable in her desire to return home – a plot thread that resolves (if that’s the word) in the paradox of rising oceans versus non drinkable water (cf: Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner: “Water, water, everywhere / Nor any drop to drink”).

As Manu, Ahi Karunaharan is suitably lost in the wake of his gross misjudgement (a mistake, many would argue, being made right now by local governments throughout the country). His sense of responsibility for the refugees leads him to urge Hine to act in a way that may either resolve or compound the problem … Manu, Hine and Zelda, then, are grounded in an observable reality with which we can empathise.

Conversely, as playwright and director, Mīria George chooses not humanise the Water Company in a way that compels us to recognise and confront our own value systems. Dawn Cheong’s Darren is highly stylised with jerky movements that could be interpreted as stress-related anxiety, a robot in need of rebooting or a metaphor for the dispassionate and inexorable mechanism of the global corporate machine. That it continues distractingly in the background as we try to decode what’s happening upfront is presumably the point. Nevertheless her powerful ‘high impact’ moments are compelling.

It may also be the point that Natano Keni’s Father Teal is stuck between the two performance styles, although his allegiance to the Company seems to go unchallenged. I remain unclear as to whether he has, or had, a relationship with the local community or whether he floats aloft in the rarefied hierarchy of ecclesiastical privilege.  

A storm is mentioned a couple of times – “It sits so heavy in the air” – but it’s not a drought breaker, an electrical storm or a wind and dust storm so I’m puzzled by it. Maybe I’ve missed the point and it’s simply a metaphor for the looming threat, or promise, of revolution. (This week’s audience can be forgiven for being especially attuned to the extreme weather storms that have devastated Bangladesh, India and Texas USA: another paradox wherein the resource that is fundamental to sustaining life can also be lethal.)

It is apt that the playdoes not solve or resolve the central problem because we are right in the middle of it; we are all part of the problem and we must also be part of the solution.  

What we are confronted, challenged and left with, then, is the concept of kaitiakitanga and our responsibilities as individuals and communities in acknowledging that role and acting upon it. As such The Night Mechanics (I have yet to decode the title: suggestions welcome) is timely and crucial, not least because it premieres during an election campaign where such issues are battling to gain traction. 

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