Wheel of Experience is a refreshingly courageous blast of music, theatricality and a good ol’ yarn. 

Playing Loft at Q Theatre, this swift and piercing jaunt down some of New Zealand’s darker historical corridors is a rigorous experience and should be seen.

Peter Daube, as the natural yet understated the narrator, presents a series of outrageous exploits from some of New Zealand’s important though least remembered legends. The play, if it is to be called this, conjures forth the likes of Dick Burgess of the Maungatapu Murders and the vehement politico Lionel Terry and many more.

It is the play’s musical stature that is most captivating and magical. These eerie tributes are simply entwined within a chain of time-warping ballads, and almost séance-inducing bluesy tunes. 

The bluegrass stank-cum-ragtime jolts envelop and nuance the heritage with hypnotic flair. The strings really come to life as banjos, fiddles, mandolins, a zhongruan and more are revealed and strummed with downright soul.

‘Multi-instrumentalism’ is not adequate to describe the kinds of melodic flair and performance sensitivities these guys – Dave Ward, Dave Kahn and Daube – reach.

Yet as the players indulge us in the romance of a bygone era, each song, each story and each character – no matter how fraught with indignity or abhorrence – is lifted up with Mana, revealing a much-appreciated New Zealand honour. To reflect on the past, warts and all, and then to share it in an authentically insightful manner, reinforces the visible aim of the piece.

The palpably rustic set design enhances the period and performance flavours with realism and metaphor. Jessika Verryt & Anita Barry have hit the right notes with the shack and its colonial southern clutter. Even as Daube occasionally trips and fumbles through the various props and assemblages you get a real sense of the basic realities of these places and people. 

So it is absolutely on point that Dave Ward, Dave Kahn and Peter Daube have composed a musical taonga that should not only be enjoyed but also seriously discussed and listened to. From small beginnings to its season in Q Theatre, I assert that Wheel of Experience, understated as it might be, is a national theatrical treasure.

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Happy am I to have finished reading The Luminaries last week, as it has prepared me well for this wonderful, intimate, articulately-musical show.  Both are rich in the dark atmosphere of the New Zealand gold-rush times: 1860s, damp, acrid, difficult, judgemental, yet quintessentially about human hopes and dreams. 

Wheel of Experience – written by the performers, Peter Daube, David Ward and Dave Khan – is a show thick with the scent of human struggle in harsh times, made alive for us through excellent music and the poetic storytelling of NZ’s many gold-rush characters. Set against a back-drop of a settlers’ hut, with tin cans and horse-heads mounted on the wall, we seem to have popped in for a dram of whiskey and to hear a tale or two.

Peter Daube’s chatty interpolations describe to us the people and situations they are singing about. Chinese, Portuguese, Sealers, Con-artists, Murderers … the stories of all of these historical figures are captured with great beauty and skill, with lines that will haunt me for days. 

“Hope is the ocean that carried us here” and “I pray that you will listen the ghosts of golden mountain” are a few that stand out for me amongst songs full of longing, despair, confusion and triumph. It’s not all heavy though, at all. 

The Tauranga audience can be a difficult one to please, and the X-Space capacity of 160 is not quite full. Yet you can hear a collective sigh after each piece finishes and most all present give them a standing ovation at the end. This is a polished performance by talented musicians and it is not to be missed.

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Onewhero. Drive to the end of the Auckland motorway, head West. 150km round trip to this small Waikato farming town. It’s pretty cold in the Onewhero Society of Performing Arts auditorium and you can hear, loud and clear, the rugby practice on the field next door punctuated by the odd boy racer. Wheel of Experience: quite.   

Onstage there appears to be the interior of a very small Musterer’s hut, crammed with various guitars, banjos and mandolins, mic stands, shaded lamps, odd bits and pieces, a horse’s head, a large wheel with symbols on it, a trombone and three mustard-coloured vinyl chairs. You get more room per person in an orchestra pit.

The audience is lively, local and loud. The boys, in settler garb, appear onstage and are so vocally greeted by the audience, they are unable to open their own show. This is going to be interesting. Long notes from the violin, a declamatory solo opening from Peter Daube, a bit shaky, a bit unsure. He comes across diffident but a man on a mission.

That’s a real Kiwi way of doing things. Raw, honest. The music gets going and we find we’ve just hurtled down the Raurimu spiral, courtesy of brilliant and inventive textures from violin, guitars and banjos, and full throated, full on singing. Three guys on mustard chairs: “What you see is what you get.” 

What you get is a taste for more. The (true) stories that feed these narratives are rich and strange. Female confidence tricksters, murderous sociopaths, exploited Chinese, duped settlers, the dark underbelly of colonial pioneer life in New Zealand. 

The musical settings lean in to the past but are wholly original. Interestingly structured, sometimes sung, sometimes accompanied monologue, sometimes programmatic, other times finding the groove. Little touches of colour, tastefully applied, don’t go unnoticed, from the thumb piano, Chinese percussion, slide guitars, bowed banjo (what?) to the extrovert jug band style trombone – not just a hat stand!

Structurally, the show is a bunch of songs connected by ad lib intros. Three guys in a heavily constrained set, deceptively low key, casual. The intros, sometimes hesitant, faltering, draw you in, relax the formality, leave it up to the songs to pack the punch. Daube seems to be the only one talking, until the end when David Ward manages a very fine intro to ‘Confession’.

Daube has all the lead vocals as well, displaying huge range from the dramatic to the expressive. He’s particularly good in the monologues, where his raw delivery and actor’s energy drive the narrative. His physical constraint onstage – either standing or sitting in one spot – is a curious choice. His energy could well take him into a much larger physical performance.   

David Ward and Dave Kahn provide the musical backings, plus backing vocals. Their musicianship is the bedrock of the piece, with driving rhythms and soulful melodies. This music is really clever, with function driving form the whole way, so that each song has its own identity, its own musical character.

Standout songs for me are ‘Golden Mountain’, the story of the Chinese settlers in NZ, and ‘We Did Seal’, a chilling tale of abandoned sealers. The truth of the predicament is grim, the inevitable outcome honoured in song. But this is storytelling:  “History is never written by those who died… except this one”. 

Our enthusiastic Onewhero audience happily joins in the horse race number, cheering mightily for our horses, convinced Phar Lap is going to clean up. Again, not quite the expected outcome.

This show takes early New Zealand settlement, turns over the stones and checks out the rich mine of dirt underneath. “Everyone needs a bad man to wash their conscience clear” as a statement of justification by the psychopathic marauding killer Dick Burgess in the superb closing song ‘Confession’ stays with me all the way home – a wintry, windy, suddenly scary, dark country road at night.

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