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

journal entries, articles, and letters. I used the same process in 2012 when I wrote the second play Dog and Bone, set during the second Taranaki war. The sickening gutpunch I felt every time I read the derogatory language in the newspapers, letters, poetry, and diaries that dehumanised Māori and called for our extermination was only slightly tempered by a pleasant tickle whenever I happened upon the musings of Pākehā settlers that were written in te reo Māori. As The Undertow was evolving (from three plays to four), so too was my writing and thinking about national identity, cultural assimilation, placemaking, and contested territories. This was reflected in my decision to call the third play Public Works (2014) and set it in No Man’s Land. For inspiration, I researched my great-grandfather’s military record. Aged 16, John Murray-Macgregor (aka Pop) changed his name and ran away from Te Wairoa to Gallipoli, and then spent the next three years taking bullets and shrapnel on the Western Front. No Man’s Land was located between the Allies and German frontlines, a god-forsaken, muddy killing field that was reabsorbed into farmland once hostilities ended. The impermanence and unboundedness of No Man’s Land provided the ideal conditions to write other realities into being. The first scene I wrote occurs over half-way through Public Works when a young soldier Hamuera is visited in No Man’s Land by an elderly gentleman called Harry. As the scene plays out it is revealed that Harry is Hamuera’s mokopuna and a veteran from a much later war. We get to follow Harry’s journey to No Man’s Land in the fourth play. The Landeaters (2015) was part of my master’s research in psychology where I interviewed an inspirational group of Vietnam War veterans on their perspectives of healing after active service. Their interview transcripts set down the thematic bedrock of the story, constructed Harry’s internal world, voice, dialogue, physicality, and fuelled his drive to find meaning and peace. I hope The Landeaters served to draw The Undertow to a satisfying end — not only for the audiences who turned up to watch all four shows in one day, but also for the characters whose wairua and voices inhabited my hinengaro for the better part of ten years.

ABOVE: The Undertow: Dog and Bone by Helen Pearse-Otene, Te Rākau Hua o Te Wao Tapu Trust, Soundings Theatre, 2016. Image: Aneta Pond.