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Why I wrote the play I wrote HELEN PEARSE-OTENE on The Undertow
I remember the first play I wrote; it was about a poor girl who tied ribbons to her ankles and transformed into a prima ballerina. I was four years old and hadn’t yet learned to read and write, but that minor detail did not stop me from scrawling my masterpiece of squiggles and interlocked circles in black biro down the length of the passage wall. When I presented my efforts to my mother she said I was to never write again. Fast forward nearly 50 years and my mother is one of the staunchest supporters of my writing, the other being my partner-in-time, Jim Moriarty. It was Jim who came up with the idea when he said, “I think we should do a play about the history of New Zealand.” I’m not very good at maths and percentages and stuff, but even I know that trying to cram a half-decent story spanning nearly 200 years of contested history into a 90-minute show is a tall order. I replied, “You can’t do it in one play” and immediately wished I hadn’t, because Jim, being the creative terrier that he is, had a light-bulb moment, chomped down hard and said, “Ok then, we’ll do it in three.” And so The Undertow was born. The Undertow series looks at the relationship between the Treaty partners, through a
whānau whose intergenerational story plays out against the backdrop of this country’s dynamic history. The Ragged (2010) is my love letter to Wellington. At the time of writing, our theatre company Te Rākau was running a therapeutic theatre programme for rangatahi in CYFs (now Oranga Tamariki). There wasn’t as much discussion on the state care-toprison pipeline phenomenon as we have now, but back then it was obvious to us, and I for one was becoming hōhā with the department and its processes that were clearly setting young people up to fail. Jim and I decided if we could do anything in the short time we had with the rangatahi, we could apply The Ragged to seed conscientisation before they were inevitably moved elsewhere. Later, we expanded our mission to include the audience, as well as the acting students and professional practitioners who would join the project. Although the characters that appear throughout The Undertow are fictional, the events that inform each play are historical givens. In The Ragged, I created characters that were composites of the New Zealand Company settlers. The majority of their dialogue was lifted verbatim from archived
