Jim Moriarty may never win an Oscar or get a knighthood for his contribution to the arts, but he is exactly the kind of guy who should. When the at risk young people he creates theatre with talk about how the experience has put them on a different path, you know they mean it. This work could be ‘worthy’, instead it is gritty, gorgeous, honest and fascinating.

The Ragged is a slice of early Wellington history, where two very different cultures collide. Here a young Maori chief from a village in the new colony of Port Nicholson is seduced by the trappings of the European settlers. Meanwhile a young Manchester man seeks a peaceful life living in a Maori village rather than living on the bottom rung of a carbon copy world to the one he left behind.

Education and religion are portrayed as mixed blessings, we are reminded of the curse of disease, guns and alcohol the settler ‘landeaters’ also brought with them. The two races, it is felt, could live in peace – but not together, and the eventual extinction of Maori is predicted.

The set is simple – a boat on sand. The young men in the cast are the waves that bring the boat and its occupant to the Maori settlement of Te Miti’s cursed stretched of coastline.

Helen Pearse-Otene has written a mini epic – a big story even though the time span is just six months, starring a hardworking cast of around 30. Many are newcomers to the stage but they are so well directed and so focused that their ensemble work is a pleasure to watch.

Moriarty’s three youngsters in the cast have inherited their father’s on-stage charisma, while the adult cast members with lead roles give moving performances. The final tableau offers hope for the future as well as being a lament for all that has been lost.
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Helen Pearse-Otene adds another impressive play to Te Rakau’s ‘theatre marae’ repertoire, with Jim Moriarty at the directorial helm. Again they reach back into history to put our shared past into perspective while providing their rangatahi* with “an opportunity to develop their self-discipline, self-awareness, self-respect, self-confidence and to work cooperatively with others,” in the process of bringing this work to life.  

Following Battalion (2006 & 2007), about a 28^th Maori Battalion WWII veteran and his sisters, and Ka Mate Ka Ora (2008), about the effect of Vietnam War on a Maori family, The Ragged reaches even further back to fictionalise abiding truths concerning early Pakeha settlement in ‘Port Nicholson’. It is billed as the first instalment of a trilogy called The UnderTOW, “which will look at our country’s dynamic history.”

Played out on a pit of grey sand, the nine scenes are set in a small south coast settlement called Te Miti, in the vicinity of the present day Ôwhiro Bay, and in the village of Thorndon on the shores of Port Nocholson, from June to November 1840. Somewhere up north a treaty has just been signed …

A wooden rowboat is the central motif, redolent of a church window when upturned against the dark back wall and well used throughout as the tale unfolds. Sean Ashton-Peach’s set and lighting design, and Busby Pearse-Otene’s sound design, facilitate and complement the ensemble and individual performance elements to support the plays dynamic structure.

A turbulent sea – impressively evoked by Ngâ Patupaiarehe (playful spirits) who manifest many elements of nature along with encroaching ‘civilisation’ – washes up a new settler, Samuel Kenning (Neil Connolly), an object of fascination and playful ridicule by the children who find him: Maaka (Tamati Moriarty), Amiria (Rebecca Moriarty) and Hera (Hariata Moriarty)

Kenning assumes property rights by virtue of his dealings with the Colonel Wakefield’s New Zealand Company. Despite his habit of addressing Maori as “savage” he soon appreciates the difference between this life and the class-based injustices of industrialised England. He becomes a favourite of the Ariki of Te Miti, Te Waipôuri (Tai Paitai), whose rangatira son has been murdered, leaving his wife Peata (Helen Pearse-Otene) a widow and their children, Maaka and Amiria, fatherless.

Te Waipouri’s second son, Tame (Kereama Te Ua) is trying to prove himself worthy of taking his brother’s place. He is often away on tribal business, to the increasing frustration of Eliza Mulvey (Sascha Gibb), whose sister Lavinia (Helen Pearse-Otene) is married to the NZ Company’s representative in Port Nicholson, Ranulf Spooner (Grant Smith).

Meanwhile Anglican missionary Thaddeus Bly (Sean Ashton-Peach) is busy ‘civilising’ the natives by teaching them English and Christianity, and Anglicising their names. Despite Te Waipôuri’s admonition that he may not hit the children, a kid’s game – delightfully played out on the beach – reveals that he does indeed whack them for speaking Maori and not answering to their English names.

Alongside this unsavoury intrusion of European ‘values’, Tame turns out to have a European taurekareka (slave /wretch /scoundrel /captive), Borrigan (Colin Barratt), an ex-convict who is badly treated by Tama and everyone else – except Kenning, who would like to intervene. A conflation of Gollum from Lord of the Rings, Caliban from The Tempest and the Schmurz from The Empire Builders, although he has a playful side and enjoys games with the children, he proves the abiding truth that those who are violently abused will violently abuse others.

It is a strength of this script that traditional elements of both cultures are up for question as well as affirmation. And it is a mark of Pearse-Otene’s skill as a playwright, and Moriarty’s as director – with Alan Scott as co-director and dramaturg – that the plot, themes, action and overall purpose of Te Rakau are once more woven together with such artistry.

Only when you think it through does it become apparent how richly meaningful this work is in form, content and style. This is true community theatre – and it’s well worth the trip to St Pats in Kilbirne to catch it.

*Find out more about Te Rakau Trust.
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Historical plays about real events are often simplistic or burdened with bias. The playwright always has too much background information to get across to an audience in a short time and it’s all too easy to pander to an audience’s collective beliefs and myths.

With The Ragged Helen Pearse-Otene dives bravely into the murky waters of the first real contacts between Maori and Pakeha and the beginnings of the colonization of Aotearoa by the British.

The playwright, who has written plays with historical settings such as The Battalion and Ka Mate Ka Ora, has now set about writing The UnderTOW, a trilogy about the history of Wellington. The Ragged is the first play and is set in 1840 in a small coastal settlement called Te Miti, in the vicinity of Owhiro Bay and Thorndon village of Port Nicholson. 

She tells the story of Samuel Kenning (Neil Connolly), who has escaped the satanic mills of Manchester for a better life. At the same time she tells the story of Te Waipouri (Tai Paitai), the chief of Te Miti, and his ambitious son Tame (Kereama Te Ua) and his volatile daughter-in-law Peata (Helen Pearse-Otene in a forceful performance).

To the disgust of many of the Pakeha settlers Samuel Kenning becomes a Pakeha-Maori as he is cheated by the dubious practices of the NZ Company and their power-brokers who establish a class-ridden society he had fled from. But no less devious are some of the more complex relationships and power struggles amongst Maori themselves as well as their relationship with the often arrogant colonists.

In short the playwright has attempted to see the inevitable conflict from both sides and she has also injected into the telling a highly theatrical device: a group of ten athletic young men who are ‘Playful spirits’. They appear as seagulls, bored musicians at a ball, sailors singing a sea shanty, surging waves in a storm, and scary monsters. They steal the evening along with Colin Barratt’s performance as Borrigan, a malevolent Caliban-like figure, a captured Pakeha slave to the Maori but with evil schemes to make himself a king.

Performed with a cast of thirty dedicated actors on a rectangular stage covered in sand, The Ragged at times gets bogged down with historical detail and a slightly overly complicated plot, but it is always arresting and at times with the ‘Playful spirits’ theatrically thrilling.
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