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The unruly tourists at the centre of… The Unruly Tourists. (Photo: Andi Crown, Image Design: Archi Banal)
The unruly tourists at the centre of… The Unruly Tourists. (Photo: Andi Crown, Image Design: Archi Banal)

Pop CultureMarch 24, 2023

Review: The Unruly Tourists is fun, but facile

The unruly tourists at the centre of… The Unruly Tourists. (Photo: Andi Crown, Image Design: Archi Banal)
The unruly tourists at the centre of… The Unruly Tourists. (Photo: Andi Crown, Image Design: Archi Banal)

It’s the most talked about local opera production in years – but does it live up to the chatter?

The lowdown

You’ve probably heard of the “unruly tourists”, the British family who created a media firestorm as they toured around the country leaving trash and turmoil in their wake. You’ve probably also heard of The Unruly Tourists, the opera which has inspired just as many headlines as the tourists upon whose story it’s based.

This controversial commission from the NZ Opera, composed by Luke di Somma and written by Livi Reihana and Amanda Kennedy (more commonly known as The Fan Brigade), was announced way back in 2020, amid a firestorm of publicity, and after a few lockdowns and postponements, it’s finally made its way to the Bruce Mason Centre, only a short walk away from Takapuna Beach where the tourists first made headlines.

Just four years on from the original saga, the opera picks it up once again, fictionalises it (the Nolans are now the Murphys) and plays it out for comic effect. It comes with a lot of baggage too – first time writers, a few false starts, a recent story that people are already familiar with – but how does it carry that baggage?

The ensemble of The Unruly Tourists. (Photo: Andi Crown)

The good

Well, it’s fun!

Comic opera is a hell of a time. Lush instrumentation, gorgeous voices, and the most expensive design in the country is a great formula for a good night out, and one that NZO is primed to provide. This show in particular transforms the Bruce Mason Centre into an in-the-round, cabaret style performance that immerses the audience and makes the show feel more immediate, more alive.

There’s also an undeniable thrill to see the conversational patter of The Fan Brigade’s songs elevated by the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra and classically trained singers. The duo’s wit has always been razor sharp, and to see their comedy get its biggest platform yet is a real treat. The joke-per-minute ratio of this show is astonishing, and it makes me want to see the pair get their hands on a show, or a story, without all the baggage of this one.

The cast playing the family (Joshua Cramond, Andrew Grainger, Frith Horan, Jennifer Ward-Lealand and William Kelly or Marley Grgicevich, night depending) are all tremendously appealing, playing them at their most grotesque and outre – basically, what you’d imagine them to be like from reading about them. They’re supported by a nine-strong ensemble, representing everyone from immigration control to dairy owners to journalists.

The sleight of hand at the heart of The Unruly Tourists is that it’s not really about the tourists at all – it’s about New Zealand, and how we responded to this family. From the opening scenes, set at immigration and passport control, it pokes fun at the hypocrisy that exists within our country. We want people to like us, we want to ask them “what do you think of New Zealand”, but we don’t actually want them to come here. 

Ebony Andrew as Manaia in The Unruly Tourists. (Photo: Andi Crown)

Hell, the family themselves aren’t even the protagonists. The real protagonist, introduced a little bit too late in the story, is Māori journalist Manaia (Ebony Andrew, also wonderful), whose colleagues constantly get her name wrong. She’s the first one to cover the story, and the person we follow as it blows up, with her bosses encouraging her to continue to chase it as it continues to rack up the clicks. It’s a clever way into the story, and it opens up pathways to jokes and commentary that a show solely focussed on the family wouldn’t have. But it also sets up a big challenge for the show: it’s not just a comic opera, it’s a social critique. 

The not-so-good

… and it’s not a very successful one.

The sleight of hand of the show – that it’s not really about the tourists, but about New Zealand – leads to a complete remove from the narrative. The family are who we want to see, and whenever they’re onstage the show is undeniably better, and has that extra jolt of energy. When the show instead focuses on Manaia, and the coverage of them, it feels like watching a TV show through someone’s front window. What the family did is exciting, and fun to stage. What a journalist does is not; countless movies and TV shows have been sunk by dull images of someone hunched over a computer with some coffee, filing stories.

So while the framing is clever, it also makes the story completely hollow. It never really gets to the heart of what it was about the tourists that riled the country up so much, and why it became the scandal that it did. Whenever it walks up to the line of really making a point about our national pride, and how selective we are about sharing the supposed glory and beauty of the country, it never crosses it, instead pointing to the media. This also displays how the show has unfortunately aged; 2019 feels like a strange utopia, when the relationship between media and public felt less distorted by a pandemic, rampant misinformation and unhinged comment sections. 

The cast of The Unruly Tourists. (Photo: Andi Crown)

For all the gorgeous staging, the grotesque costumes and the huge cast singing their lungs out, the show ends up revealing what the family actually was: a pretty badly behaved bunch of people who just happened to receive an unusual amount of attention. The difference is the media had the (limp, admittedly) justification of public interest.

The NZO has no such justification. This show uses the family as puppets, speaking our truth back to us, but not their own. It’s pretty galling knowing that one of the people depicted (albeit loosely fictionalised) in the show has since passed, which is only referred to brutally and bluntly in a single sentence in the programme, by someone who didn’t even work on the show.

New Zealand and its media are not difficult to critique. The Savage Coloniser Show did it brilliantly, without pulling punches, grounded within anger and wit. The Unruly Tourists has no such grounding, because it is the same beast it’s pointing the finger at.

The verdict

The media jumped on the family looking for a few clicks. The opera jumps on that same family, rehearses their story, dresses it up and sells tickets. The audience might laugh, but those laughs don’t last very long.

The Unruly Tourists runs until March 26 at the Bruce Mason Centre as part of the Auckland Arts Festival.

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