Pig Hunt. The best new New Zealand play I’ve seen…for a long time. Maybe it’s because I love gender issues. Maybe it’s because I love Wainui.  Maybe it’s cos I’m sick of dragging my boyfriend to boring theatre all year, and for once he was genuinely excited post-performance. Or maybe it’s because I like seeing a play that (to use a terrible cliché) makes me laugh, cry and think … [Read more]

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Both theatrically and in terms of dialogue this Ronald H. Morrison meets Barry Crump meets Lorae Parry piece is pure gold. Its celebration of local and national kiwi bush lore is worthy of the rugged greats, Crump and Morrison; its exploration of the gendered psyche and emotional repression is a Parry-like step in the right direction to counter the “post-colonial stiff upper lip chest out shoulders back bullshit” (in the words of writer Brian Hotter) that still plagues many an aspect of our culture.

Brian Hotter’s script offers thoughtful, deep and worthy reflection via the lives of three characters: Rob Harding, the white plumber in Wainuiomata (played by the versatile Jason Whyte); James Rapana, Rob’s mate and the local butcher (played by the consistent and comical Jamie McCaskill); and Donna Rapana, Rob’s lover and passionate, if adrift, artist (played with sympathy by Rapai Te Hau). Through the interactions of these three characters, and in particular through the pig hunting scenes of Rob and James, we gain a view into the mindset of the Kiwi Everyman who would rather put himself through tremendous pain than admit his own weakness; and who would rather push his nearest and dearest away than risk appearing vulnerable. These are themes reminiscent of Gavin McGibbon’s Stand Up Love, except when Hotter introduces a fatal illness into the script the complexities and attitudes this ethos creates are truly put to the test.

The interweaving of light contemporary comment and fact (such as the sculpture MP Trevor Mallard has commissioned Donna to make for “his Wainui”, or the visit to Te Papa Museum where the “real kiwis”, the everyday, feel uncomfortable and out of place and Rob “likes the super-bike”) adds well aimed elements of humour, anchors the play firmly in our present, and allows it to resonate with viewers of all walks of life – from the Wellington dwellers who have never made it over the hill into Wainui, to the residents of that town themselves.

Set by Brian King is also thoughtfully rendered, and a valuable contribution to the production. The carved half moons on the corrugated iron wall are reminiscent of Hotere, the artist the play most invokes. These half moons glow red at the revelation of Rob’s illness – the big ‘C’ – and the terror of this moment is greatly enhanced by the visual ‘C’ spelt out behind him. Lighting by Marcus McShane contributes strongly to this effect, and to the dark and tangled atmosphere of the later bush scenes.

Between Rob and Donna a real and believable chemistry is captured, both in script and acting. Rob responds to the fear of his illness with an alienating and agro staunchness – a delicate illumination of those aspects of emotional repression which perhaps cause the most pain. Donna reacts with her own kind of feminine staunchness, refusing to “turn on her man brain” and toughen up to Rob’s austerity. Whyte manages to maintain our compassion for Rob throughout this and despite his anger, his love for Donna is still apparent. Te Hau on the other hand lets her frustration show, and it is the frustration of so many women caught in similar struggles for emotion intimacy. While Donna’s staunchness is also fearsome at times, it is staunchness with a cause; she wants desperately to help Rob “cut the crap” and free himself from his fears.

The relationship between Rob and Donna does however highlight one difficult aspect of the production; it is often hard to tell how much time has passed between events in the script. While not always a problem, this obscurity does make it difficult to relate to certain scenes, such as the bitterness and aggression which suddenly arises between the couple when they go pig hunting together. As Rob’s confession of his illness has come only a scene or two earlier, it is not clear whether this fight is an immediate response to his confession, or the result of a long period of unhappiness. The unexpectedness of this fight does cause it to jar a little.

There are other scenes which utilise aggression as a tool for the characters for relate to one another, and this works well. The final, sour battle between Rob and James is both disturbing and heartbreaking. And the final scene is the most poignant and memorable of the night; suffice to say that it captures many of the hitherto alluded themes, and also that quote “The more I see of human nature the more I love my dogs,” printed in the programme. Pig Hunt is tender, hilarious, and Real; a brave and honest move by a talented production team.

Originally published in The Lumière Reader.

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Thomas LaHood’s review of Pig Hunt has just been republished in Wellington’s Capital Times, good news for promoting the industry but sad if it means some pundits stay away. This is a new play breaking new ground, tightly written, marvellously performed, and offering a thoughtful and moving theatrical experience. At least that’s how I found it, and on three or four counts in particular.

Unlike Thomas I really admired the set (by Brian King, who has great talent and is a real gift to  Wellington theatre). The setting moves around a lot and the multi-level staging has to be used variously, but the core of the narrative line is that an ordinary young man is dying, yes of cancer, in an ordinary New Zealand house in an ordinary suburban garden. The imaginative range of the play takes the audience into the gorse-, bush- and scrub-covered hills surrounding Wainuiomata, but its characters’ daily living and dying is acted out in the ‘burbs. How better to convey the awkward co-existence of these worlds than by a plant-shop and punga-log-edged straggle of garden hebes and grasses?

The director says that "plays dealing with male friendships and male emotions are rare in New Zealand". As Thomas says, male bonding is found elsewhere and especially, I might add, in plays based on wartime male camaraderie. For me however Pig Hunt is uniquely reminiscent of aspects of Foreskin’s Lament. Both expose the emotional isolation that comes when big questions arise right in front of even the best ‘good keen man’: "Waddarya?" (It’s Hamlet’s "What a piece of work is a man?" and so "To be, or not to be?", all over again"). Incidentally, like Foreskin the title here is misleading if not wayward; the play’s original title Tha Nui more cogently connects Wainuiomata ("tha ‘Nui" over the hill from the Hutt Valley and Petone) with "The Big C" that Rob, Donna and James variously must confront.

And that’s another aspect of Pig Hunt I admire. John Smythe called the play "an extraordinarily poetic evocation" of the ways people cope with "what life dishes up through nature, nurture and circumstance" (unfairness, disappointment, failure and in both personal and socio-economic terms). Cope is what each of these three friends must do (though I have to agree that Donna’s role is underdeveloped, the back-story emerging too late to fully engage us with her character). For all three, again as John says, "what’s being said is not nearly as eloquent as what’s being felt and clearly communicated to us in performance, … gain[ing] a poetic edge that takes us deeper into their subjective experiences". Isn’t this the real, subtle and sophisticated purpose of sub-text?

The play’s not perfect of course, but there are two other things I want to say. One is to point to the stunningly theatrical (or meta-theatrical) enactment of Rob’s relationship with his dog Trigger which opens the play and which acts as a marvellously post-modern device in the tradition of the soliloquy. There’s one particularly moving (and, again, purely theatrical) scene, a ritual libation, as poor Rob makes a final toast of farewell to all his dogs now deceased by pouring some of the Jack Daniels he uses to blunt his pain onto the ground as he names them.

Additionally, Laurie Atkinson in his DomPost review highlights what was another marvellous image for me as well, both visually and emotionally, as James lugs Rob out of the bush on his back, recalling the trophy-bearing conquests of their pig-hunting but here as the signifier of  "mateship, mortality, struggle, determination". And of course I want to mention the play’s brilliant final sequence, imaging Rob (Jason Whyte)’s doggy and dogged loyalty and love for life. This is stunning: his reward at last?

Finally, I think Pig Hunt uses Mâori language in an innovative and interesting way. James and James’s sister Donna, now Rob’s wife, speak Mâori naturally to each other, and their conversations in te reo thus enrich the aural texture of the script. John Smythe suggests this as a theatrical strategy, where the theatrical text is "eloquent without being understood word-for-word", that consciously echoes the sometimes obscure lingo or patois of Kiwi-bloke talk. Certainly it seems a remarkably comfortable usage of te reo.

For me it does something else as well. The use of te reo Mâori in Pig Hunt helps in the construction of an emerging New Zealand identity, more specifically, a newly emerging Pakeha identity. A few days ago I attended part of a congress of The Council for the Humanities/Te Whâinga Aronui in Wellington, on the general topic of national identity explored in terms of ideas, history, cultures and so on. One paper by John Newton (a professor in the English programme at Canterbury University) was called "Becoming Pakeha". His point is that Pakeha identity is a work-in-progress. At the same time it is the work-in-progress of a relationship of indebtedness. Uniquely in the world it seems, Pakeha New Zealanders are learning to be named as such, and are thus being created, by the indigenous people, the tangata whenua.

Newton says: "’Becoming Pakeha’ requires taking ownership, not just of the depradations that Europeans have visited on Mâori, but also of the positive debt that Pakeha culture owes to its enabling Other." This is a new idea to me, quite different from the "liberal guilt" concerning "white privilege" that used to be imposed on Pakeha as beneficiaries of our dominant (post-colonial) culture. It is also quite different from the (re-)claiming of rich Mâori identity that emerges from specifically Mâori plays such as Briar Grace-Smith’s.

So Brian Hotter, albeit unknowingly, may have set off (on) more scents and traces in his Pig Hunt than he was consciously aware of … but that’s how theatre works, isn’t it? And if so, "Tha Nui" will certainly turn out to be a big one, after all. 

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After reading one of the two reviews and the (now discredited) comments that support it on this site, I go to Pig Hunt half expecting a clumsy wallow in bogan grossness. Instead I witness an extraordinarily poetic evocation of ways of being in conflict with what life dishes up through nature, nurture and circumstance.

Everything shifts from the basic value systems and blokey repartee of a couple of mates, who like to counter their butchery and plumbing jobs with a spot of pig hunting, when one, Rob, finds he’s got inoperable bone cancer. But not before he shacks up with Donna, his childhood sweetheart and sister of said mate, James.

Rather than pursue a maudlin trudge through tragedy, playwright Brian Hotter plays with a brand of non-naturalistic realism that director Kerryn Palmer and the actors – Jason Whyte (Rob), Jamie McCaskill (James) and Rapai Te Hau (Donna) – embrace with alacrity.

Thus their encounters in back yards, on hillsides and in the bush, where what’s being said is not nearly as eloquent as what’s being felt and clearly communicated to us in performance, are intercut with relatively stylised sequences where matey hooning and inner turmoils gain a poetic edge that take us deeper into their subjective experiences.

The ‘improvised’ tour bus trip to Wainuomata is redolent, style-wise, of John Godber’s Bouncers, while the idea that they’re acting up for a video camera that’s catching ‘a day in the soon-to-prove-too-short life’ of Rob, validates the device in naturalistic terms. Homegrown music is also used to authentic effect.

While I don’t catch every word of dialogue – because the fast-taking banter and stream-of-consciousness / internal monologue elements sometimes cop interference from Kane Parsons’ otherwise excellent soundscape (a question of balance between performance and technical operation) – the substance remains in what is not being said; what words cannot be found for. That this is intended is reinforced by the use of Māori dialogue between Donna and James, which is also eloquent without being understood word-for-word (by such as me).

Given the need to share the space – including geometric rostra – with The Venetian Bride, set designer Brian King quite validly opts to evoke Donna’s place rather than the less ruly bush. And Marcus McShane’s lighting unobtrusively helps track the shifts in location.

With insight and sensitivity Rapai Te Hau captures the complexities of how Donna’s love curdles in frustration at Rob’s inability to appreciate her vocation as a sculptor, and her singing adds great value.

As the mate wrestling with his best mate’s mortality, Jamie McCaskill finds a special kind of love and humanity in James’s default persona of easy-going joker. His singing voice and guitar-playing are also bonuses.

Jason Whyte makes Rob absolutely and idiosyncratically his own, and his final trip into the bush – on liquid morphine, I take it – in the persona of his beloved dog, brings humorous yet poignant focus to the whole question of values and priorities in human existence. The physicality in itself is a thrill to watch.

Hotter and team have created a special piece of theatre with Pig Hunt, exploring its territory in a way that would not suit any other medium. It is definitely a play that deserves this production and full houses to boot.
 

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Pig Hunt is now up and running alongside another new New Zealand play, The Venetian Bride, which opened earlier last week at Bats Theatre. The content of the two plays is so geographically, stylistically, socially, and linguistically different that it is hard at times to believe they have this country in common.

The cultured, Europeanized and ordered world of the well-to-do in The Venetian Bride is alien territory to the likes of the three characters of Pig Hunt: Rob Harding, plumber and pig hunter from Wainuiomata, his mate from childhood James Rapana, a butcher, whose livelihood is threatened by a supermarket in Petone, and his sister Donna, a sculptor, who marries Rob.

And yet both plays deal with mortality, the repression of emotions, the search for love, and the overpowering grip of a passion which in Rob Harding’s case is pig hunting. Rob finds it almost impossible to express his feelings to his wife but he can talk to his beloved dogs about the triumphs and excitement of a hunt.

Pig Hunt is, structurally, a curious mixture. At one point Rob and James perform deep in the bush what is in essence a long double comedy act of reminiscences and dirty jokes which is also at the same time a eulogy to the people and the attractions of life in Wainuiomata.

The play ends with a marvelous scene, beautifully performed by Jason Whyte, which I won’t give away by describing but it encapsulates Rob’s transfiguration that reveals his true emotional self.

A great deal of the play takes place out in the bush on a pig hunt. Miming and some excellent sound and lighting effects let us feel something of the primal excitement of man versus beast. It is during these scenes that Jamie McCaskill and Jason Whyte best expose the complexity of the underlying emotions of mateship. Rob’s relationship with Donna is less sharply defined, despite Rapai Te Hau’s sparky performance, largely because Donna’s role is underwritten.

Apart from the surprising final scene there is one image that will remain: James lugging an ailing Rob on his back like a trophy from a pig hunt: mateship, mortality, struggle, determination. The play in its rather haphazard way deals with all these things.
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This is the sorry tale of a pig-hunting plumber (Robert) who fumbles his way into marriage with his childhood sweetheart (Donna).  Trouble is, he’s got this terminal osteosarcoma that he doesn’t like to talk about, and it’s killing both him and his relationships.

The play is promoted as a ‘visceral experience’, but is really anything but.  In fact it’s tiresome and predictable, with a fussy production design that conjures up landscape garden rather more than NZ bush.  Even the pig hunting sequences are flat and repetitive where they might have been thrilling.

Playwright Brian Hotter’s treatment of his home town Wainuiomata is at once angry and nostalgic, the kind of contempt that only familiarity can breed.  The town itself receives an extended tribute when Robert and his best mate James stage an imaginary bus-tour for home video.  Their litany of pointed observations goes on too long and, despite the efforts of the cast, does not gel with the realistic style of dialogue used elsewhere.

This sequence, like many others in the play, suggests that Hotter is simply too close to his subject.  In his apparent anger and frustration at his characters’ parochial small-town existence he brings nothing new to our understanding of their lives.

Jason Whyte continues his ‘year of the pig’ in the lead role, looking suitably rough with a short beard and blue Swanndri.  Whyte can play the tortured bloke with his eyes closed, and he’s an obvious choice for the part.  Yet even he can’t make this one fly, labouring his way through uninspired monologues and ‘bittersweet’ lines like "We’ll ride the wind and catch the biggest pig you’ve ever seen."

It’s an arduous role both to play and to watch.  Robert limps around the stage, falling over again, and again, and again, until all you want to do is grab a rifle and put the guy out of his misery.  That said, his final scene in a new and unexpected role exhibits all the quirk and vitality that the show needs so desperately from the beginning.

Jamie McCaskill fares better as the best mate and brother-in-law James, bringing an integrity and warmth to his role that ultimately saves the production.  He manages to find nuances that are sorely lacking in the other parts – possibly because his character is not overwritten to the same extent.  Rapai Te Hau works hard to bring truth to her role as Donna, the art-schooled wife who needs her husband to open up, but her character is simply too weakly drawn, her dialogue too forced and clumsy.  Still, what can you expect … this one’s all about the blokes.

Director Kerryn Palmer says she was drawn to Pig Hunt because "plays dealing with male friendships and male emotions are rare in NZ."  This is simply untrue.  Our theatre history is heavy with male bonding – recent efforts Strange Resting Places, Niu Sila and The Cape spring to mind, but the list goes back a long way.  Lack of male-oriented scripts has never been a problem in this country.

Palmer’s company Parallel Universe, like so many others today, claims to be striving for ‘innovative’ productions.  It’s a shame, then, that Pig Hunt demonstrates precisely the kind of hamstrung, conservative formula for theatre-making that NZ needs to move away from.

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