Romeo and Tusi: An Eclectically Musical Samoan/Māori Romeo and Juliet from Aotearoa/New Zealand

Abstract

Is there a distinctive New Zealand Shakespeare? What ‘new’ approaches to Shakespeare have originated from New Zealand? This article explores the issue by contextualising a version of Romeo and Juliet staged successfully throughout New Zealand in the late 1990s. The production is set against the background of the history of Shakespeare in New Zealand, which goes back to the arrival of Captain Cook on the Endeavour in 1769.

Pacific Underground's Romeo and Tusi sought a looser and more populist kind of Shakespeare performance. They used the conceit of rehearsing the play at high school, where a Māori Romeo and a Samoan Juliet cross community boundaries. Drawing on several music genres, and performing outdoors, they generated a Shakespeare that audiences from a diverse range of ethnic and cultural communities could enjoy.

Notes

1. Where appropriate I use this composite term, combining the official name, ‘Aotearoa/New Zealand’ (deriving from Abel Tasman's visit in 1642, naming the islands after the Netherlands province of Zeeland), with the Māori term Aotearoa, land of the long white cloud; the combined term signals the aspiration towards bicultural (as in Julie McDougall's piece here) and multicultural artistic production.

2. P. M. Ryan, P. M. Ryan's Dictionary of Modern Maori (Auckland: Heinemann, 1994), p. 20; prior to the arrival of European settlers, Māori did not identify as a specific group of indigenous, but rather each tribe or iwi identified with specific locations and handed down a distinct genealogy or whakapapa recounting how their ancestors had come to be in that location. This dictionary is the source for all the definitions of Māori terms in this article and those used by McDougall and Warrington.

3. John Golder, ‘A Cultural Missionary on Tour: Allan Wilkie's Shakespearean Company 1920–1930’, in O Brave New World: Two Centuries of Shakespeare on the Australian Stage, ed. by John Golder and Richard Madelaine (Sydney: Currency Press, 2001), pp. 121–43.

4. See the articles by Julie McDougall (pp. 331–41) and Lisa Warrington (pp. 305–16).

5. Thanks to Catherine Silverstone for the precise framing of this paradox.

6. See Michelle Keown, ‘“Can't We All Just Get Along?”: bro'Town and New Zealand's Creative Multiculturalism’, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, 8.2 (2008), 44–65.

7. All reviews of the production quoted here can be found at <http://www.theatreview.org.nz/reviews> [accessed 30 September 2008]. For a scathing alternative response to the tour, see Carolyn Sale's ‘The Measure of a King: King Lear Royal Shakespeare Company’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 26.2 (Summer 2008), 139–49.

8. Thanks to Philip Armstrong of the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, for providing footage of one of these performances.

9. Evening Post (Wellington), 17 March 2000, p. 13.

10. Translation of Māori text from New Zealand Folk Song, <http://folksong.org.nz/epapa/index.html> [accessed 10 December 2008].

11. Pasifika is the accepted umbrella term for groups from the Pacific Islands (Samoa, Tonga, Biue, the Cook Islands) who have settled in Aotearoa/New Zealand since World War II, and, as with Pacific Underground, are now making a distinctive contribution to various art forms.

12. Panel staged on 9 July 2000 in Auckland. This was a meeting of ANZSA (Australia Aotearoa/New Zealand Shakespeare Association) and the first to aggressively highlight issues around bicultural, Pacific Shakespeare. My thanks to Michael Neill, who convened the conference, and provided video footage of this panel.

13. Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du Texte (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973), p. 22.

14. ‘Re-citing Shakespeare in Post-colonial Drama’, Essays in Theatre, 15.1 (November 1996), 15–23 (p. 16).

15. Oscar Kightley and Erolia Ifopo, Romeo and Tusi (Wellington: Playmarket, 2000), p. 1. From this point on, page references are inserted in the main body of the article.

16. Much like the struggling women in Michel Tremblay's Les Belle Soeurs or Tomson Highway's Rez Sisters.

17. For nuanced studies of ‘performance’ and ‘gender’ in Shakespeare and other Renaissance playwrights, see Stephen Orgel's Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 196) and Sophie Tomlinson's Women on Stage in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).