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

Contributing writer
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.

Keep going!
The PSVR2, in all its dubious glory. (Image Design: Archi Banal)
The PSVR2, in all its dubious glory. (Image Design: Archi Banal)

Pop CultureMarch 23, 2023

Does the PSVR2 finally make VR worth the plunge?

Contributing writer
The PSVR2, in all its dubious glory. (Image Design: Archi Banal)
The PSVR2, in all its dubious glory. (Image Design: Archi Banal)

VR gaming has come a long way with the new PSVR2 console – but is it worth putting down the controller and putting on a helmet for?

When it comes to virtual reality, I remain something of a luddite. My past experiences with this form of gaming have mostly led to nausea, headaches and physical exhaustion. This isn’t necessarily all VR’s fault – as a person who thinks of gaming as being a very sedentary activity, and an artform where active engagement is limited to the hands and sometimes the brain, I accept my share of the blame.

Still, I approached the Playstation VR2 (PSVR2) with some trepidation. Of course it’ll be better than the first one, just as the PS2 was better than the PS1. But would it finally make VR a necessary part of gaming, and not just a novel nice-to-have?

Pictured: The PSVR2 in action. Not pictured: This author. (Photo: Supplied)

My first impression: this is definitely the easiest time I’ve had with a VR console. While it still takes some time to set up, with a non-ideal amount of cables and menus to go through, once the setup is done, it’s done (and to be fair, it’s not really more arduous than setting up an actual console, except most consoles are not worn on your person). 

In all other areas, the specs of the PSVR2 are a massive improvement on the first. The controllers are easier to use, the helmet is much lighter (even including a bit of ventilation) and it now includes eyetracing, which allows the console to track exactly where you’re looking at every moment. There is no onboard audio, however, so you either have to use headphones or rely on whatever sound system is attached to the console.

The most crucial thing about the PSVR2 is that it allows a dynamic space – so if you don’t have the necessary space to use it to its full potential, you can still use it. As VR continues to develop, this aspect will be more and more necessary – you can only reach so much audience if you require a certain amount of space, let alone a player to be able to navigate that space easily and without strife.

The game I chose reintroduce myself to VR with was Altair Breaker, which is billed, correctly, as a “sword fighting experience”. You swing a sword, you hit the thing in front of you, with some combo variations. It’s as close to swinging a sword as I ever care to get in my life, and it feels as good as it’ll probably ever feel, too. It’s here that the immersion of VR really appeals – feeling the vibrations as you connect a hit with an enemy is undeniably addictive, even if the actual gameplay gets pretty repetitive after a while. 

Altair Breaker, on the PSVR2. (Photo: Supplied)

The flagship game of this console is Horizon: Call of the Mountain, a spinoff of the popular Horizon franchise that focuses around the two key joys of that series: climbing big mountains and shooting big things with arrows. The story, which only slightly overlaps with the series, is mostly perfunctory, which works to the game’s favour; if you know the franchise, you’ll appreciate it, and if you don’t you won’t care – there’s things to climb and arrows to shoot.

Both aspects of the gameplay feel great, and are about as engaging as I can imagine VR being. Neither lends itself well to long gameplay sessions, and I found myself needing to take the helmet off after half an hour to re-engage with the real world a bit (something that I can imagine would become less and less necessary the more time I spent in the helmet).

Call of the Mountain wasn’t the best time I had in the console, but it was the one that gave me the most appreciation of how far the tech has come. Just like Altair Breaker is the closest I can imagine coming to swinging a sword, Call of the Mountain is the closest I can imagine coming to mountain climbing and firing a bow, and the capabilities of technology to bring people closer to previously unattainable experiences is hard to overrate.

The terrifying (trust me) gameplay of Dyschronia: Chronos Alternate on PSVR2.

Strangely, the game that appealed most to me was Dyschronia: Chronos Alternate, a visual novel set in a city where dreams are used to predict when and where crimes happen (so Minority Report if it was a lot more anime). It’s not the sort of game that I can imagine being a huge hit – it’s a visual novel, and a horror – but for a genre that can often feel even more remote than actually reading a book, it again showed me the capability of what VR can do. It can bring a tired genre alive, bridging the gap between the screen and the player. Although, fair warning: horror in a VR set is really, viscerally terrifying!

I still have some reservations around VR gaming, however. It’s not that the tech isn’t there, and it’s not even that the games aren’t there. If you want to feel like you’re swinging a sword around, it’s easier than ever (though not necessarily less expensive) and more comfortable. But I have yet to have an experience with a game using a VR headset that I felt really necessitated the use of VR; basically, it still feels like a gimmick.

Horizon: Call of the Mountain, as played on PSVR2. (Photo: Supplied)

I play games to have fun, yes, and I even play games for escapism, but I’m yet to play a game in which VR felt necessary. There’s no doubt that VR has had its killer apps – the games that make a crowd rush out and buy a console solely so they can play that one game – namely Beat Saber and Half-Life: Alyx – but they still feel like niche experiences. If the PSVR2 catches on, I can see the Horizon game catching on in a similar way, but it doesn’t change my perception that VR remains oddly niche.

Niche is not a bad thing, of course, and nor is it something that is insurmountable. This console is already leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessor, and it’s only at the start of its life cycle. In a year, or maybe even less than that, I can see it having a killer app that finally sees more than a niche group of gamers engaging with VR. Until then, it’ll take something special – or super weird – for me to put down the controller and put the helmet back on.

The PSVR2 is available in stores now.

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