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'NIU SILA' LOOKS AT PACIFIC MIGRATION |
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By
Caroline Armstrong |
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Niu Sila, a play about childhood
friendship and Pacific Island migration will be kicking off Downstage
Theatre’s 2004 Subscription season in April. Niu Sila – a unique new
story of friendship – has been written by two of New Zealand’s top
comedy writers – Oscar Kightley (Naked Samoans, Fresh Off the Boat) &
Dave Armstrong (The Semisis, Spin Doctors).
Funny and poignant, Niu Sila is about a friendship spanning over thirty
years, two cultures and one neighbourhood. In 1970s Wellington,
six-year-old Ioane Tafioka – fresh off the boat from the Pacific –
moves in next door to six-year-old Peter Burton. They begin an unlikely
friendship that will change their lives.
What is different about Niu Sila is that it looks at Pacific migration
from both palagi and Pacific Island points of view. ‘Many plays have
looked at Pacific migration to New Zealand from a Pacific Islander’s
point of view,’ says co-writer Oscar Kightley, who also co-wrote Fresh
off the Boat, ‘but Niu Sila is the first to consider it from both
Pacific and Palagi viewpoints. Niu Sila shows that Pacific migration
has affected New Zealanders in more ways than just the clichés of sport
and music.’
‘I hope palagi audience members who enjoy this play,’ says co-writer
Dave Armstrong, ‘will entertain the idea that Pacific Islanders
contribute far more to our society than cleaning our offices and
scoring the odd try on the wing.’
Peopled
with drunken uncles, crooked ministers, left-wing university professors
and a no-nonsense Polynesian matriarch, this
hilarious and thought-provoking story of friendship will delight and challenge
anyone who has ever lived in New Zealand.
‘Even though it’s full of crack-up comedy,’ says Armstrong, ‘ I look at Niu Sila
as a sad play. It’s a sort of a requiem to a time in New Zealand where white and
brown kids grew up side by side. They went to the same schools and their Dads
and Mums often had similar jobs. Now that’s all changed.’
Both Kightley, a Samoan, and Armstrong, a palagi, had close childhood
friendships with children from the ‘other’ culture. During the writing process
they swapped their often hilarious stories of encountering each other’s culture.
‘I had some palagi friends who I would visit for dinner,’ remembers |
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Dave Armstrong |
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Oscar Kightley |
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Dave Fane |
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Kightley. ‘All I wanted to do
was silently eat their wonderful food, then perhaps talk afterwards, but the
parents kept interrupting my eating with their polite dinner-time conversation.
Their friendly questions, which I felt obliged to answer, kept stopping me from
eating!’
Armstrong remembers the warmth of the communal style of living of his Pacific
friends. ‘My family was a comfortable and middle-class nuclear one – Mum, Dad
and four kids. Yet down the road my Pacific friends had aunties, cousins, and
all sorts of people dropping in all the time. I remember envying them, even
though they didn’t have much money, and thinking their life was far more
exciting than my boring old middle-class one!’
While much of Niu Sila relies on humorous childhood memories, there is also a
serious undercurrent to the comedy and the play confront issues such as violence
and racism – both personal and institutional. ‘I was never in trouble with the
police as a kid,’ explains Armstrong, who grew up in Wellington in the 1970s,
‘but the minute I walked down the street with a Pacific Island kid, we would get
stopped by the cops. We’d never done anything wrong, but they’d still stop us.
That never happened when I was with palagi friends’. Kightely got so sick of
being stopped by police for no apparent reason that he made a laminated sheet
relating all his personal details. ‘Every time I got stopped I’d just hand over
the sheet,’ says Kightley. This and other real-life incidents are used to
humorous effect in the play.
As well as the politics of bicultural friendships, the sadness that often occurs
as childhood friends grow up is also documented in Niu Sila. ‘Outrageous comedy
occurs when kids from different cultures grow up side by side,’ says co-writer
Dave Armstrong, ‘and Niu Sila reflects this. But the play also chronicles the
tragedy of cultures on a collision course. Kids grow up and suddenly close
childhood friendships don’t mean so much any more.’
Niu Sila stars Dave Fane (Naked Samoans) and Damon Andrews (The Tribe), each
playing a virtuoso range of male and female characters. ‘In rugby terms it's a
big ask and demands 120% from the two actors on stage playing all parts,’ says
actor Dave Fane, who plays a huge range of both Pacific Island and palagi
characters in the play. ‘I'm looking forward to working with old friends on a
great story seen through a set of new eyes.’
Directed by Conrad Newport, with Design by Brian King and Lighting Design by
Lisa Maule, Niu Sila opens at Downstage Theatre on Friday 2 April.
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Copyright Event Polynesia Ltd.
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