A 25th anniversary production of Oscar Kightley’s seminal work Dawn Raids vividly brings history into the present, writes Sam Brooks.

The lowdown

Oscar Kightley’s Dawn Raids, first produced in 1997 by theatre collective Pacific Underground, makes its Auckland mainstage debut one year after prime minister Jacinda Ardern formally apologised to the Pasifika community for the government’s actions in the 1970s. The play tells the story of one Sāmoan family during one of the most shameful eras in our country’s history, but also explores what the entire community went through at the time.

Auckland Theatre Company collaborates with Pacific Underground on this new production, supporting a great many Pasifika artists to make their mainstage debut, bringing the play to a new generation of theatregoers and reopening the conversation that Kightley ignited back in 1997.

The good

Simply put, Pacific Underground and Auckland Theatre Company have delivered a production that feels worthy of a 25th anniversary. It would be easy for the topic’s importance to settle on the show like a deadweight, but directors Troy Tu’a and Tanya Muagututi’a keep the show alive with a powerful core cast, a 10-strong ensemble and a live band.

That core cast have to play their own vividly-painted characters while also representing a generation’s worth of hurt. There is obvious tragedy in the story of Sione, a singer who pretends to be Hawaiian rather than Sāmoan at his pub gigs, and Fuarosa, his fiancee who is practically housebound lest she be discovered as an overstayer. But the moments that really sink in deep are delivered by the play’s older characters. I suspect it’ll take me a long time to forget the way Bella Kalolo-Suraj’s To’aga quietly pushes a tissue back up her sleeve, as though she’s tamping down decades of unspoken grief, or how Lauie Tofa’s Mose snaps when the happiness he’s been clinging to is suddenly taken away from him.

The play feels as much educational as it does cathartic; we’re further from the play’s debut than that production was from the actual raids, and there are moments when the history lesson is made blatant. If we get to enjoy Sione’s feelgood Elvis covers in the early part of the play, then we can’t look away when his friends are shoved into the back of vans by cops later on. We have to pay attention, we have to acknowledge, and we have to learn. It’s a history lesson in the best way; depicted by real people, not read about in books.

The not-so-good

The fact that this production is celebrating the 25th anniversary immediately draws attention to the script’s age. If it feels very much like a play from the late 90s, that’s simply because it is. A layer of dust has settled on the words that takes a good half hour for the production to blow off, but once it does, it’s a smooth ride to the finish. It’s a difficult task to update the bare bones naturalism of Dawn Raids in a way that helps it fill the cavernous ASB Waterfront Theatre stage; this is a show that almost seems to demand the inelegant trope of fading to black while people move the set around onstage. That’s not a strike against the play or the production itself – a 25-year-old play is in the uncanny valley between “classic” and “modern” – but rather the context we’re seeing it in.

For the Auckland theatre community, the programming of this show feels like one part anniversary and one part apology. Dawn Raids should have been on a stage of this size, of this import, a literal 10 minutes from the suburb in which it’s set, when it was first written in 1997. You can’t help but watch this production and wonder what doors might have been flung open had it been.

The verdict

See Dawn Raids. Shows like this only get staged if people see them, and shows like this only get written if the powers-that-be stage them. Not only is Dawn Raids a light shone on a shameful part of our nation’s history, it’s also a spotlight on an important part of our theatrical history.

Dawn Raids runs until September 3 at the ASB Waterfront Theatre. You can book tickets here.