Wher­o’s New Net, by Albert Belz, is a play inspired by The New Net Goes Fish­ing, Witi Ihi­maer­a’s 1977 col­lec­tion of short stor­ies look­ing at the exper­i­ences of rur­al Maori mov­ing to the cit­ies.

This play takes the idea for­ward to the next gen­er­a­tion, look­ing at Whero (played by Bree Peters), a young Maori woman liv­ing in Lon­don and try­ing to make a break as a sing­er-song­writer. She’s rather good, but a little nervous and some­what over­shad­owed by Red, her con­fid­ent, glam­or­ous music­al part­ner.

Whero is sup­por­ted by her Irish man­ager and his boy­friend, also urb­an Maori. All is going well, when Whero meets a mys­ter­i­ous stranger – an East Coast Maori fulla who has the diary of her deceased fath­er.

And it’s there that things get inter­est­ing, with Whero hav­ing to deal with aspects of her fam­ily’s past, her present and the pres­sures of the future.

The Massive Theatre Com­pany pro­duc­tion tells a dra­mat­ic, emo­tion and funny (the “haka les­son” scene is fast becom­ing legendary) story, told well through Sam Scot­t’s dir­ec­tion and the ver­sat­ile set by Tracy Collins.

The play is full of songs – both quoted snip­pets of old pop tunes (I did­n’t expect to hear bloody Bros at Down­stage, that’s for sure) and ori­gin­al music by Tama Waipara.

Wher­o’s New Net reminds me of the idea that you can try run­ning away from your troubles, but some­times they’ll sneak into your suit­case and come along for the ride.

And while the story was set in Lon­don, I can see a bit of rel­ev­ance for a town like Wel­ling­ton that attracts more than its fair share of cul­tur­al migrants, and hav­ing to deal with their old troubles in a new city.

It’s a won­der­ful piece of new New Zea­l­and theatre.

Wher­o’s New Net plays at Down­stage until Sat­urday, August 29.