Jamie McCaskill’s play The Biggest is one of three that came out of time spent writing in his hometown, Thames, in recent years. A touring production of Not in Our Neighbourhood, an affecting, devastating one-woman drama about a women’s refuge safehouse, played at The Court in 2016. The Biggest, directed here by Ross Gumbley,is an entirely different beast: a broad comedy about the everyday rituals that rural men use to connect with and distance themselves from one another, and the ways that Pākehā and Māori relate to one another.

A group of aging barflies – Walter, Mick, and Pat – decide that the best way to help their mate Stu, who’s wheelchair-bound with a busted leg after writing off his car and boat, is to enter a high-stakes fishing competition. Never mind the fact that none of the men managed to work up the courage to visit Stu during his painful convalescence. The person who catches the biggest fish will win a new boat and, even better, bragging rights – great currency at the local pub, which is the men’s de facto home.

Their biggest obstacle, apart from an inflated sense of their own abilities, is Jan, the boyfriend of Walter’s daughter Cassie, who is both a terrific fisherman and a total wanker. It’s a clear set-up for good-natured comic hijinks that are muddied by the revelations of some long-held secrets that trouble the easy pattern of everyday boozing and ask the men to look harder at their lives and relationships.

Robert Lloyd is warm, energetic and charming as swandri-wearing Māori serial shagger Walter Mack, and his fearful unwillingness to engage with the serious issues of his own health and wellbeing will be recognisable to many. Mark Hadlow is such a physical performer that it’s a lot of fun watching him channel this energy into a frustrated alpha male who feels trapped by his wheelchair and humiliated by his impaired mobility.

Walter’s no-nonsense but discontent daughter Cassie (Juanita Hepi) is the only character, apart from taciturn Māori expat-come-home Mick (Apirana Taylor, reprising his role from the 2016 Wellington production), who seems to have an ounce of sense, but the role doesn’t give her much to do.

Bumbling, genial but miserable Pat (Phil Grieve) offers some clownish laughs, and acts as an unwitting example of some of the entrenched aspects of everyday Pākehā racism, especially in his articulation of the myth of the ‘good’ Māori and his unexamined attitudes towards what Pākehā should, and should not, share with Māori. For anyone who’s spent any time in local pubs or taverns, with men who are solving the world’s problems one jug at a time, these are recognisable archetypes.

I particularly appreciate the way that Nick Dunbar takes Jan from an insufferable prick of an antagonist to someone who, while still a complete jackass, is nonetheless more sympathetic and complex. Dunbar is clearly having a great time with the character’s obnoxious hyperactivity, and a brief scene in which Jan is shaving, while singing a Lorde track to himself, has me roar with laughter.

I am a big fan of McCaskill’s other work, but it breaks my heart that, despite pockets of vitality, much of this production feels really underdeveloped, didactic and reliant on cliché. The script sounds as if it still needs a couple of passes to better develop subtext and character, to make the heavy signposting a little more complex, and to find ways to show and not tell. Or, perhaps the production itself has been unsuccessful in drawing nuance out from the broad and often predictable prompts the script offers. Either way, I feel like I’m being clubbed over the head like one of the poor snapper that are caught by the men.

It’s a pity, as there’s so much here that’s worth exploring: fears about literal and figurative impotence; the impact of being disconnected from your culture, language or family, by choice or circumstance; what it means to be Māori, or even ‘Māori enough’, in 2018; the Pākehā denial, or embrace, or Māori knowledge and custom; the opportunities, or lack thereof, offered in New Zealand; the cultural and psychological stagnation of small towns; the importance of social ritual in small communities.

There’s also a canny celebration and critique of homosocial male bonding, some prodding at the tangled notion of the ‘good old days’, and some pointed eye-rolling at Pākehā whose notion of race relations is still stuck back in the 80s, but it’s all presented in very broad strokes.

Most importantly, the quest to be, or catch, ‘the biggest’ – as Cassie calls it, a dick-measuring contest – highlights the way that the patterns of habitual, demonstrative, boorish pub-going mate-ship, which here is built on binge-drinking and insult-laden banter, might fulfil an immediate need for company, while also effacing the more vulnerable and intimate sorts of relationships that we need to sustain us emotionally and spiritually, especially in the face of our own mortality.

For all its obvious and enticing promise, and despite some gorgeous moments, this is a frustrating play to watch. The men’s antics never really get out of second gear, there isn’t a lot of panache in the staging or setting, and there are little things – like being able to hear offstage stage business, sound problems, and clunky technical transitions – that have no place in a professional production like this. Perhaps it will relax a little, find a more confident sense of flow, and head out of shallow waters, as the run continues.

Finally, as an audience member who has heard Dave Dobbyn’s ‘Language’ and Th’ Dudes ‘Bliss’ signal communication difficulties and getting on the piss respectively in half a dozen productions of New Zealand plays in the last few years, I’m begging local theatre makers for a moratorium on tracks from the ‘Nature’s Best’ pop music hit compilations acting as grossly unsubtle narrative shorthand during scene transitions. Surely there’s a better way to tell stories.

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