Shakespeare with Polynesia

Samoan playwright unites Shakespeare with Polynesia

By Jennifer Little

TAKE a Shakespearian

romantic tragedy, fuse it with a modern tale of tribal Polynesian conflict, throw in a Samoan drag queen, a four-piece band and a talk show, and you have a

startling piece of theatre.

The acclaimed universality of the Bard’s enduring themes has found new voice in a Polynesian-style interpretation of “Romeo and Juliet” that has played to packed houses throughout New Zealand this year.

Samoan-born playwright Oscar Kightley, 30, already had a list of suc cessful plays he has written and per formed in over the past seven years before he found a vehicle for the work of his favourite playwright, Shakespeare.

His latest play, “Romeo and Tusi”, features a young Maori who meets a Samoan girl at a bingo night in South Auckland.

The teenagers fall in love, and just happen to have the leads in their school production of “Romeo and Juliet”, to the chagrin of Tusi’s mother who cannot bear to see her daughter kissed on stage by her Maori Romeo.

A Samoan drag queen replaces Shakespeare’s nurse, and a pious Samoan minister acts as the Friar. Consequently there is more hilarity than heartbreak in “Romeo and Tusi” than in Shakespeare’s play.

While Kightley’s reinvention is by no means faithful to the text, nor to the trag ic outcome of the original story, his play does highlight a more serious undercur rent of racial tension between New Zealand’s indigenous Maori population and immigrant Pacific Islanders, despite their common racial origins.

And while the conflict between Verona’s Capulets and Montagues is not

fuelled by the same motives as that of Auckland’s neighbouring Polynesian groups, “the animosity between Maori and Samoans is real,” says Kightley.

Kightley was educated in Auckland the self-proclaimed Polynesian capital of the world - before becoming a newspaper journalist.

He recalls a latent brooding tension from his school days between various Pacific Island groups.

His mother, he says, is “hugely racist towards Maori,” but people of his gener ation have moved on. As his play reflects, the divisions are still with his parents’ generation.

Kightley writes for television, but his real passion is live theatre. He is the dri ving force behind Pacific Underground, a cooperative of about 20 Pacific Island actors and writers committed to creating mainstream theatre that reflects their cul ture.

“We have a following of people who want to see good stuff, accessible stuff.

A lot of our audience don’t usually go to the theatre,” says Kightley.

His approach to theatre is nourished by his love of Shakespeare, Chekhov and Ibsen, as much as by contemporary Pacific Island stories. Beyond that, his dalliance with Shakespearian themes looks set to continue into the next mil lennium.

He has recently been commissioned by Auckland’s foremost performance venue, the Aotea Centre, to write a nineties West Side Story-style musical epic with Polynesian characters.

And that would surely be the realisa tion of a self-styled “reef-breaker’s” dream, which is how he and other Pacific Underground members metaphorically see their growing movement.

“We are the first wave that breaks the reef so that the rest of the ocean fol lows,” says Kightley. ■