As his play returns to the stage in Tāmaki Makaurau, Oscar Kightley sits down with Toby Manhire to reflect on the injustices it tackles, on a dazzling body of work, on family, on community, and on the places he calls home.
To celebrate 10 years of Parrotdog, The Spinoff is partnering with the brewery to share the stories of New Zealanders doing great things. In the first series of Birdseye View, we’re interviewing 10 interesting Aucklanders about their relationship with the city and how it shapes their lives.
Oscar Kightley’s first distinct memory has him on the way to the airport in Apia. It is 1973. He is four years old and about to move to New Zealand, though he doesn’t know it. “It was the first time I got to ride in a car. I didn’t know we were going to the airport. ‘Wow, a car!’” he says, channelling his four-year-old self. “And I got to go in it. Next minute we’re going to the airport. It was only two villages down the road.”
His destination and new home: Te Atatū, Auckland. He moved in with his aunty and uncle, becoming part of their family. For a long time he assumed that had always been the plan, but in fact on that drive to the airport in Samoa, his mum meant for them both to return in a few weeks. It was to be a holiday with family. But his aunty persuaded his mum he should stay.
“My mum told me what happened years later,” says Kightley, with a wince. “She had just lost her husband.” Your father? “Yeah. It was hard for my mum. She’s 25. She’s about to lose her four-year-old. I know it was tough. I laboured under the misapprehension for most of my life that I was brought here and left here. Actually what happened was my aunty was like, we should look after him. Samoans were coming to New Zealand. It was an opportunity – for schooling and everything. And she went back. So I grew up with my aunty and uncle and all their kids. They became my siblings. That was Te Atatū.”
The first New Zealand memories are “pretty terrifying”, he says. “Not speaking English. Settling in. New country, new language. Being hardout shy. Being scared of teachers. White kids.” It was the 1970s. “Back then no one talked to kids. Nowadays I think we’re better at telling kids what’s happening. Back then, nothing was ever explained. You just did it. You just got on with it.”
Another thing no one much discussed was the dawn raids. The invasions of Pasifika homes by the state, in the name of a crackdown on “overstayers”, hung heavy in the air and fresh in the memory from 1974 and into the 80s. But: “No one ever talked about it. Why would you? I think we were made to feel ashamed.”
Growing up Kightley picked up bits and pieces about what had happened. “Our house, like many Samoan houses, was like a satellite immigration department. We did have relatives come in, stay, and then leave. It was just something I heard.”
When he was 23, and living in Christchurch, a founding member of the Pacific Underground arts collective, Kightley decided to write the play. He did it because someone had to. “There were no shows. No discussions. Not even an acknowledgment it happened. We were expected to just suck it up and move on.” After more than a year of research and wrestling with the idea he completed the script, and a few years later, in 1997, it was staged in Auckland and Christchurch. Tonight, 25 years on, a new production, a collaboration between Pacific Underground and Auckland Theatre Company, opens. The return is prompted in part by last year’s “formal and unreserved apology” from the government – an apology Kightley regards as necessary but not sufficient.
The impact was immediate and lingering. It was “insidious”, says Kightley. “Are we really these people that everyone is so afraid of? No one else had police and dogs accompanying immigration officials to people’s homes. It still messes me up. It still beggars belief, for me, that it happened. And those attitudes are still here. Look at – fuck – look at that story this morning about those poor workers in Blenheim.” We’re talking on the day Stuff published a report headlined “Migrant workers packed in freezing, damp rooms for $150 a week”. He says: “These are the sort of companies that were crying out to let in workers and when they are let in they still treat them like shit. Because they see them as less than human, not deserving of the same respect, because they’re from the islands.”
Some things have changed, some haven’t. Just when he’s beginning to think it’s all different, he’ll find himself online. “I read the comments at and I think: fuck. Essentially a lot of people don’t care. ‘They’re Islanders. They shouldn’t have overstayed.’ They’re still buying Muldoon’s schtick … I thought, after all this time, after they saw how many Islanders have helped build this place, I thought the attitudes would have softened. It doesn’t seem that way. You still get that attitude,” he says. “Maybe it will always be there.”
“I’m nervous as fuck,” says Oscar Kightley. We’re sitting outside a cafe in Grey Lynn, another of his stomping grounds, and he’s laughing at his own apprehension. In a career spanning three decades, Kightley has won countless critical and commercial accolades, received a royal honour, and amassed a formidable body of work spanning theatre, TV and film, as writer, actor and director. Pacific Underground. Bro’Town. The Naked Samoans. Harry. Sione’s Wedding. He wrote Dawn Raids and he directed Dawn Raid – the documentary about the South Auckland hip hop label that borrowed its name from the events of the 70s. And that’s just the top shelf. He’s a journalist, a columnist, a broadcaster; he even for a few seasons did sideline commentary for Super Rugby. But he’s still nervous. How nervous? “I’m a squirming fucking mess. I see the posters, I think fuck. I see the dates and, fuck.”
The nerves aren’t about the production – he has every faith in the team led by director Troy Tu’ua. He’s urged them to shape it however they please. So what then? “Maybe it’s because of this piece in particular. Maybe because of the response in 1997 – it only got to do two seasons. Maybe it’s because it’s the first and only play I’ve written on my own.” It’s a story that speaks to an almost unbearably weighty episode in his community. And something that draws on all those different parts of his professional life: the journalist, the activist, the director (the first production), the actor (he was Sione in the second), the writer of comedy and drama tangled up together.
“I’m still sensitive, still too sensitive after all this other shit we’ve been discussing happened,” he says, examining the contents of his coffee mug. “I’ll still feel like I felt on opening night [in 1997], which is: hearing the words come out and thinking, people are getting a glimpse inside you … Maybe it’s because it means so much to me. Out of everything I’ve done, Dawn Raids is the one I’ve got a weird relationship with.”
He had to be persuaded to go with that title in 1997. “It was a full-on term for us and I didn’t want it to hold fear for anyone who might come to see it. I’d rather bring people to a piece of work and surprise and delight them when they sit in the dark.” And this is neither museum piece nor lecture. It’s a family story, with laughs – “an exploration of how our community reacted”.
Kightley’s experience of the play since it was last professionally staged all those years ago has been in schools, where students have performed the show as part of classwork. He’s felt “amazed and grateful” to witness performances that were “brilliant, hilarious and sometimes terrible. I loved it. I’d sit at the back and watch these nervous sixth formers.”
In 1997 he’d sit at the back and shiver. “I was so sensitive to how stuff was perceived. I’ve tried to make myself less sensitive. And maybe I’m better at building a thicker skin but those feelings are not far below the surface. I’m excited and grateful at the same time. But it’s like somebody opening you up and having a look at your insides.”
Oscar Kightley embraced being funny when he was at Rutherford College, Te Atatū. At some point, he says, “I just started taking the piss.” His class went to see the film Gandhi and he promptly made some glasses in Mahatma’s image in metalwork. “I walked around in my Gandhi glasses for months.” Having relaxed into the role of making people laugh, “I found life a lot less stressful.” Almost four decades later, his final column for the Sunday News concluded with a Gandhi quote. (He also found room in there for JFK and Boyz II Men.)
In Kightley’s work, comedy is everywhere – it’s earned him fame through the plays, the Naked Samoans, Bro’Town and Sione’s Wedding. But in Dawn Raids and elsewhere the humour mingles with anguish, just as Kightley’s intoxicating grin can tip almost imperceptibly into a grimace, or tenderness, or melancholy.
When he was living in Wellington, working on Gibson Group comedy shows Skitz and Telly Laughs with people like Jemaine Clement, Cal Wilson and his great friend and collaborator Dave Fane, Kightley devised a strategy for dealing with the overbearing attentions of police. He printed out and laminated a card with answers to the stock questions unleashed when they pulled him over.
“We were profiled like shit,” he recalls. “You always knew the questions and the order they would come. So I just thought I would help us both, me and the cop, to move more expediently on with our evenings.”
He still sees it going on today. “Poor kids. Pulled over for being young. Pulled over for being brown. Pulled over for driving a crappy car.” And he’s happy for others to pick up the concept. “I recommend it. If you find that happening to you a lot. It just shows them you know what’s going on.”
A few years earlier, before he shifted to Christchurch to present the youth TV show Life in the Fridge Exists (L.I.F.E) and launched into Pacific Underground, Kightley was a cadet at the Auckland Star, then the city’s evening newspaper. He joined as Osa, but the editor, Jim Tucker, suggested Oscar might work better as a byline.
“He’s a nice guy. He wasn’t being an arsehole about it. He was trying to be a friendly boss,” says Kightley. “At the time, because I was such a reader and I loved Oscar Wilde, I didn’t mind. I was like, yeah, cool, I’m Oscar now.” Looking back, he says, it was “another advance in my lessons about New Zealand”.
“At home,” he says, “I’m still Osa. I’m still Osa to all my cousins and and people I went to school with.” He pauses and corrects himself: to most of his old school friends, and to his teachers, he’s Ossah, he says, as in Oscar just without the C. “That’s the horrible way they pronounced it. You never corrected it back then.” Because it was routinely mangled, “I kinda didn’t like my name, so when I was presented with the option of changing to the Anglicised version, I was like, yeah, at least people will be able to say it. But I’m still Osa. Oscar’s my public name.”
Dawn Raids is back on stage; the Naked Samons regrouped a couple of years ago; A prequel to Sione’s Wedding immersed in the 80s (“that was a real buzz”), called Duckrockers, will soon come to TV. What about a sixth series of Bro’Town? “I’d like to do a movie,” he says, “but we’d need to adjust the tone – rightfully so, sensibilities have changed over the years.”
He hesitates: maybe Morningside is not for life. “I’d like to see young cats do a different Bro’Town. Not Bro’Town but something that’s more relevant for today,” he says, before recounting some of the scenes of young brown kids he’s observed in recent weeks wandering the Auckland streets after school.
And Harry? The 2013 TV drama cast Kightley alongside Sam Neill as south Auckland cops. Both were brilliant. It was shamefully under-celebrated and lasted just one series. “It was hard,” says Kightley. “In comedy you get to hide. But I was proud of that. I was pissed off it didn’t go again.” That might have had something to do, he suggests, with TV3’s pivot to “shiny floor shows”.
It was also exhausting – he drank too much in the evenings in an effort to “wash my mind at the end of the day’s work”, he says. “Your body doesn’t know that you’re just acting.”
“I had a terrible time,” he says. “I loved it.” He remains available for series two.
Kightley counts himself lucky to have had four parents. His father died when he was a kid. His aunty and uncle have in recent years passed. His mother moved to Auckland. She lives today in Morningside. He’s a father himself now. His son is three, growing up, as his father did, in Te Atatū. Kightley leans across the table and shows me a picture of his own dad and flicks to one of his boy – the resemblance is clear enough. “Having this little guy changed me a bit.”
Becoming a parent is one of the reasons Kightley decided to throw his hat into another ring. He’s running for the Henderson-Massey local board. “The New Zealand I met in the Te Atatū of the 70s and 80s had a large part in forming me.” Much has changed around the place, including his suburb’s name. What was Te Atatū North is these days the estate-agent-friendly Te Atatū Peninsula. Te Atatū then was full working class, grittier. Police would roll into the tavern, he says, and pretty much just “bash people”. “That was my introduction to New Zealand. It wasn’t the flashest place. But it was awesome. It’s flash now. It’s got two sushi places.”
He laughs at the idea that this might be just the first rung on a political career. “There’s a big saying in Samoa, the path to leadership is through service [o le ala i le pule o le tautua]. It’s not meant to be about ego or vanity. It’s: can I help?”
He’s up for it, too, because he covered council meetings in Waitematā. “I remember as a cadet journalist at the Star, thinking, ‘this is going to be boring’. It wasn’t boring at all. It was awesome.” The fact that a young Tim Shadbolt was in his prime at the time might, however, have had something to do with that.
And while he’s uneasy about some of the more doctrinaire or pious expressions around representation, that does figure in the decision to put his name forward – it’s always has. “When you’re part of a group of people that have been told you don’t belong here, so many aspects of your life then become about showing that you do.”
He says: “I hate the narrative of Islanders coming here for a better life, because it isn’t always a better life. It’s not like that’s some terrible place and this is a nirvana. But I always had that drive – especially after I was older and found out what had happened with Mum. I was, oh shit, I’ve got to make her sacrifice, all our parents’ sacrifices, worth it.”
That contributed to making Oscar Kightley “quite intense as a young artist,” he says, wheezing through what I think is a grin. “Probably too sensitive. Now I realise: focus on what’s important to you and it will work for other people.” Strip away everything else, he says, and the motivation is straightforward. “I just want to make work that will make my mum proud and not make my son cringe.”
He swipes open his phone again to a picture of his three-year-old. “I named him Osa. I thought, no one’s going to mispronounce his name.”
Dawn Raids is at the Waterfront Theatre to September 3.