Three men gath­er in a room. Detect­ive Inspect­or Brett is look­ing for Bruce Mason who has gone miss­ing. Rev­er­end Athol Sedgewick had din­ner with Mason the night before last and is pos­sibly the last per­son to see him before he dis­ap­peared. Werihe has an eight o’c­lock appoint­ment with the play­wright. No-one has any idea where he has gone. The stor­ies the men tell each oth­er – about the invest­ig­at­ive pro­cess, their lives, their memor­ies – gradu­ally bring them to a real­isa­tion that all may not be as it seems and that the facts may be stranger than fic­tion.

It opens with George Hen­are (Werihe) singing a love song against a shim­mer­ing golden cur­tain. He retreats to the wings then after the cur­tain opens reappears in the office of Bruce Mason where he sits down to wait. Hen­are imbues his char­ac­ter with a calm still­ness along­side evid­ence of a more mis­chiev­ous nature. Many of his lines are in te reo Māori reflect­ing some of the themes Mason explored. It is a pleas­ure to hear Māori on stage in this con­text. Andrew Grainger (Detect­ive Inspect­or Brett) enters next. Grainger as Brett is cheer­ily upbeat even when the char­ac­ter­’s life seems to be fall­ing apart. He is bluff and hearty while allow­ing a small meas­ure of doubt to creep in. Finally Carl Bland (Rev­er­end Athol Sedgewick) enters. His char­ac­ter is the most on the edge of real­ity and memory. Bland makes Sedgewick resi­li­ent in his grief and accept­ing of strange events that hap­pen around him. He also has some of the best mono­logues in the play. The three work togeth­er in an ensemble that cre­ate some beau­ti­ful moments on stage. The miss­ing play­wright is played by Bruce Mason through record­ings.

This is a premiere of a work by Carl Bland and is co-pro­duced by New Zea­l­and Fest­iv­al, Auck­land Arts Fest­iv­al, Theatre Stam­pede and Night­song Pro­duc­tions. Dir­ec­ted by Ben Crowder it is an explor­a­tion of the effects of grief. The script is clev­erly struc­tured. It has some lines that are pos­it­ively deli­cious, and scenes that circle around each oth­er with their word play. The set by Andrew Foster is decept­ively simple. Cos­tumes by Eliza­beth Whit­ing sup­port the idea that this is a con­struc­ted real­ity. Beau­ti­ful light­ing by Nik Jani­ur­ek includes one mar­velously sur­pris­ing moment. Gor­geous anim­als cre­ated by Main React­or oper­ated by Ella Bec­roft make brief yet import­ant appear­ances. Music and sound design by John Gib­son is fun­da­ment­al – from the love songs sung by Hen­are to the sound­scape in the final scenes.

 

Famil­i­ar and extraordin­ary.

  • Te Pō, by Carl Bland, dir­ec­ted by Ben Crowder on at Sound­ings Theatre, Te Papa, to 5 March 2016