In order to create an opportunity for award-winning actors Anapela Polata’ivao and Goretti Chadwick “to utilise their phenomenal talents by playing against type”, much-honoured playwright Victor Roger has put a Samoan twist on the premise of Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit (aka Huit Clos, which is the French equivalent of the legal term ‘In Camera’, meaning a discussion behind closed doors).

Most recently Anapela won directing and acting awards for Wild Dogs Under My Skirt and Goretti won a Wellington Theatre Awards Accolade for Outstanding Performance for her performance in Still Life with Chickens. Both shows are due to play internationally next year. And indeed anyone who saw those shows could be forgiven for not instantly recognising either of them in Uma Lava; their personalities are so utterly transformed.

The third lead is played by Mario Faumui, a graduate of the Pacific Institute of Performing Arts (PIPA) where Anapela and Goretti were his tutors. Wellington saw him earlier this year in Victor Rodger’s Club Paradiso and next year hisfa’afafine creative ensemble Fine Fatale will tour to Hawaii. 

Completing the cast is Paul McLaughlin, who went to Toi Whakaari with Victor and has been absent from Wellington stages for far too long (last seen, I believe, in Equivocation).

The question, then, is does Uma Lava simply serve as a showcase for these actors or does the play have a greater purpose for them to serve? A bit of both, I think.

Sartre’s No Exit and Rodger’s Uma Lava both confine three highly incompatible people in a locked room in Hell. In the final moments of Sartre’s play the one male, Garcin, says: “All those eyes intent on me. Devouring me. What? Only two of you? I thought there were more; many more. So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone … Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE!”

Torture for Garcin, then, is having nowhere to hide; having his callous cowardice (and closet gayness?) exposed for all to see. Estelle’s need to validate herself through sexual relationships with men (some commentators call her a nymphomaniac) is compromised by the angry and jealous gaze of the would-be manipulative lesbian Ines, whose advances she has rejected. All three have committed grave mortal sins in pursuit of their desires and have not faced up to them let alone sought redemption Hence their consignment to Hell.

Rodger brings the sexual incompatibility of his trio of doomed souls to the fore and explores their corrupt behaviours in a thoroughly modern Kiwi context. Rather than have them trying to justify themselves, then having their crimes exposed, they –and we – are treated to video replays of their life-cum-death-changing moments.

Designer Sean Coyle has exemplified the legendary ‘landlord from hell’ with his bare and barely furnished windowless room, dripping with slime and riddled with mould, exacerbated by Jennifer Lal’s alternately cold, hot and sometimes frightening lighting. Unnerving sound effects (uncredited) also play their part.

The first to be shown into his new accommodation is Garth. Mario Faumui fully embodies this politically questionable upwardly mobile professional whose repudiation of his Samoan culture, distain for those he sees as beneath and primary concern for his image has caused misery and death. Garth’s cowardice lies in his failure to own his own sexuality. (Sartre linked Garcin’s cowardice to his being a conscientious objector, for which he was executed.)

Anapela Polata’ivao is seriously scary as Lina, the aggressively predatory lesbian who is also a hard-working academic claiming to be “in charge of her own narrative.” It’s her jealous rage at being passed over for tenure that has led to the action that’s brought her down. Look for an on-screen cameo from the playwright himself, in this context. What commitment, to sacrifice himself thus in the cause of art!

There’s a big surprise in our discovering the occupation of the third arrival, Stella, which I won’t spoil here. As she expresses her horror at finding herself in Hell, and reveals herself to be ‘a woman with needs’, Goretti Chadwick’s physicality is a joy to behold. Because the video evidence of her crime was shot clandestinely, the sound is muffled – and I have to confess I needed to ask around afterwards to understand exactly what had happened.

In place of Sartre’s low-status Valet, we have TD himself (no prizes for guessing what the initials stand for) as mein host, played with confident directness by Paul McLaughlin. TD’s choices of torture and torment require no over-playing of evilness and they are all the more effective for that.

Director Vela Manusaute, who is also the videographer, has presided over a dynamic and impactful production that elicits horrified laughter on cue.

You may have seen claims, as on the Circa website, that “This show contains material that hopefully offends most people.” We are warned that it “contains strong language, sexual content, and blasphemy” and that “Uma Lava is a riotous, irreverent comedy of terrors where no sacred cow is left unslaughtered.” True to its promise, then, we are witness to things not normally seen on stage where the extreme discomfort of the characters involved is equal and opposite to the hilarity of our shocked reactions.

Beyond all that, in the interests of engaging us more subjectively, I can see the potential for more being made of each character’s attempt at self-justification and their inability to face up to what they have done. As for the consequences, Uma Lava means ‘the definitive end’ but in this context there is no end to this ending: the characters are stuck in it for Eternity – and I feel more could be made of that too (cf: the definition of Eternity in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man).

Towards the end of the play Stella, Lina and Garth ridicule the way the Samoan concept of ‘va’ has been elevated to ‘The Va’ with a capital V. (In his 1996 essay Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body, Albert Wendt writes, “Important to the Samoan view of reality is the concept of Va or Wā in Maori and Japanese. Va is the space between, the betweenness, not empty space, not space that separates but space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together in the Unity-that-is-All, the space that is context, giving meaning to things. The meanings change as the relationships/the contexts change.”)*

The point of Uma Lava, then, is that these three detainees have neither the inclination nor the capacity to achieve a true connection with each other across the spaces that separate them. They are doomed to remain disunited – trapped together but alone – for E-ter-ni-ty … This Hell is the inability to relate humanely to other people.
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*(More recent MA theses on the subject include The Potential of Vā: An investigation of how ‘Ie Tōga activate the spatial relationships of the Vā, for a Samoan Diaspora community and Patterns and motifs in the Va: a Samoan concept of a space between.) 

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