The Black Friars Present ....
MACBETH ....
'Something Wicked this way Comes'
The Black Friars Theatre troupe presents an innovative re-staging of the traditional Shakespearean classic for Pasifika in Aotearoa set against a backdrop of imagined Hawaiki, fusing Polynesian music and dance with Shakespearean magic.
The South Auckland based group was formed in 2006 out of a desire to challenge the dominant stereotypes surrounding Pasifika people and to “keep talented young brown people off the street and on the stage”. These days their mission statement has changed. They are now determined to “build bridges and make mirrors” but the vision is the same - They want to tell stories that matter to Polynesian people and they want to make existing stories relevant to them.
We talk to Billy Revell the co-director and one of the founding members of 'The Black Friars' about the upcoming production.
"This was the first time we held open auditions, we usually just keep it inhouse and go with people we know but this time we thought it'd be cool to put it out to the community and see who's keen and willing to do some Shakespeare and who would fit the part. We held the auditions a few weeks out - our rehearsal season was a bit shorter than usual so we had auditions and then it was straight into the rehearsal so it's been 5 weeks.
We didn't have a lot of people audition for us - we had maybe 7 or 8 and of that we took maybe 6. It was an interesting process and I think one that we'd manage better in the future. It was our first one and no-one really knew about us.
The cast & crew after rehearsal at MIT in Manukau
We originally wanted to do pre-colonial Samoa but we pushed that out to our idea of Hawaiki so it's sort of like Pan Pacific. We've got Fijian song, Niuean dance, Tongan song & dance, Samoan song & dance and it's sort of like our imagining of a Pan Pacific imaginary place of Hawaiki. We've maintained everything in terms of the storyline of Shakespeares 'Macbeth' and it comes in line with what we believe about Shakespeare in that all of his stories are universal and can be applied to all of us. Thats what we got out of 'Othello' when we did that back in '07 and 'The Merchant of Venice' when we did that 2 years ago.
Macbeth is played by Lauie Tofa - he's good quality aye? He's one of our stronger actors who leads from behind, he doesn't usually say a lot but when he does he really takes on that leadership role which lends itself to Macbeths character. He's also one of the founding members of the Black Friars along with myself, Michelle Johansson and Misipele Tofilau.
Misipele and myself both play murderers. I wanted to take a back seat and you know we say there are no small roles only small actors. So I took on the challenge of helping Michelle out this time with directing and taking a smaller role but it's kind of given me a bit more time to develop the murderer a bit more.
Denyce Su'a plays Lady Macbeth. She had a large role in the Merchant of Venice as well. We've worked with her before and she's just graduated with her Masters in Drama at Auckland Uni. Then we have Jatinder Singh who plays MacDuff. We've got some really young talent playing other parts.
L-R Jatinder Singh (Macduff), Theo David (Malcolm), Lauie Tofa (Macbeth), Denyce Su'a (Lady Macbeth) & Jake Arona (Ross)
Billy Revell - Actor/Co-Director
I don't want to spoil too much but we've got Irene Folau who recently won the 'Stand Up Stand Out' and so she's involved in the play quite heavily. I don't want to give away too much but we've got a really talented acting group thats backed up with really strong singing from Saia Folau.
Music and dance is always found within our cultural realm and so that shows itself in the play as well. Our Music Director for this one is Saia Folau. We also got Nafu Tofilau - he's a young producer working with Swiss at the moment. We've got Max Tuipulotu and Solo Folau who is Saia's little brother as well as Misipele who throws in his ideas - he was our original Music Director. All of the music in terms of the Shakespeare stuff is all original but he's taken from Pacific songs and added them in to the mix.
L-R Nafu Tofilau, Saia Folau & Max Tuipulotu
Our set up at the Mangere Arts Centre is introverse which will be interesting in itself which means there's a stage on both sides so we have to play both sides - it's sort of like a catwalk so that'll be interesting to see how that plays out. What we really want to do is get our young ones along because Shakespeare can sometimes be hard to get your head around but it's sort of one of the reasons we do this is to make it more accessible to our youth. We're hoping to get a few school groups through.