Modern Drama

In recent years, Aotearoa / New Zealand’s theatrical profile has centred increasingly on its reputation as a burgeoning hub of Pasifika cultural production and on the broadening international exposure and commercial [End Page 540] success of its artistic products. Yet, there is another narrative of theatre-making in Aotearoa, long unacknowledged by the nation’s official theatre culture, which focuses on community-based theatre initiatives that have engaged audiences beyond established theatre-goers, have told community stories that circulate outside the dominant national imaginary, and have operated apart from the commercial and cultural sphere of the mainstream theatre economy. It is this story – with its provocations, challenges, and possibilities – that Paul Maunder traces in Rebellious Mirrors.

Maunder’s retrospective of community-based theatre from the early 1970s to the early 2010s is informed by his forty-year career as a community theatre practitioner and is stimulated by his deep concern about the silencing of plays and production processes that do not fit within professional, market-based paradigms. Designed as a contribution to New Zealand’s theatre history and as a resource and advocacy tool for arts workers, Rebellious Mirrors is a revisionist survey, an autobiography, an exhortation, and a manual for best practice. It is a highly personal account, foregrounding the author’s own memories, experiences, biases, and political predilections, but it also manages to incorporate a wide range of material and voices within its ambit, in ways that reflect the communal approach at a formal level. Maunder begins by briefly mapping an alternative history of New Zealand theatre, from the 1840s to the 1970s. Taking a cue from Raymond Williams, whose analysis of the material processes of artistic production forms a frame for the book as a whole, Maunder exposes the ideological prejudices of a settler culture focused on developing home-grown Pākehā (European) playwrights, and a network of professional urban theatres. In contrast, Maunder draws attention to early left-wing, grassroots attempts at theatre-making, along with the community-based potential of indigenous Māori theatre, and charts the emergence of a conflict between community-arts efforts and mainstream-theatre practice that persists to this day.

Chapter two focuses primarily on the 1970s, examining how the challenges to mainstream praxis, during that decade, gave rise to the community-based developments of the 1980s and 1990s. Maunder concentrates on two movements – avant-garde theatre and a new Māori theatre arising from politicized sovereignty activism – and considers their individual development and their collaborative intersections. This section is connected most intimately to Maunder’s own coming-of-age as a community-based artist, exploring his attempts to nurture experimental theatre in the wider community, the challenges of balancing his own artistic vision with the community’s needs, and the contested issues of ownership and representation in cross-cultural theatre making.

Maunder’s third, and most substantial, chapter deals with the mature phase of community-based theatre in New Zealand, considering a broader range of projects undertaken after the transition to neo-liberalism in the [End Page 541] mid-1980s. Maunder profiles a diverse array of groups, practitioners, and plays developed in prisons and residential centres, with at-risk youth, children, the unemployed, trade unionists, mixed-ability performers, the aged, and students, as well as with Māori, Pacific Islanders, and various other ethnic groups. This overview presents illuminating insights into different community concerns, important social interventions, and artistic initiatives at play in Aotearoa, while highlighting the uneasy way in which many arts workers operate within the neo-liberal framework, especially given the sharpening tension between community-based projects and a theatre industry increasingly embedded in commodity relations.

These concerns feed directly into chapter four, in which Maunder argues that this long-standing ideological schism has affected arts policies, funding measures, and the design of theatre-training curricula, contributing to a lack of sustained support for and the marginal status of community-based theatre. The book’s concluding chapter carries over this...