Tiri: Te Araroa – Woman Far Walking is the final production of Auckland Theatre Company‘s stellar 2025 season. Witi Ihimaera‘s classic play has been reworked into a bilingual exploration, condemnation and even a bit of celebration of The Treaty of Waitangi, leading us to the future while reckoning with the past.
This past is embodied in the flesh and blood and memory of a 185-year old woman, Tiriti, named for Te Tiriti, which was signed on 6 February 1840, the day she was born. So much to remember, so much she would rather forget…
The stage is not a stage, it’s a path, a star strewn catwalk unfurling from a celestial door. A form emerges, a rough-hewn lump inches forth. A creature? A taniwha? No, it is an old woman clad in a black kahu huruhuru (feathered shawl), an ancient woman who rises, hunched over two canes and faces us, declaring herself a freak, against nature, against God. Maybe Dracula made her one of the living dead, but he’s the one who died… Maybe…
She tells us that she lived in a time when Maori ruled this land, after Maui fished up the islands with a hook made of his grandmother’s jawbone. Wandering between English and Te Reo, she laments there have been too many suns on too many mornings. 185 years…
She is known as Tiri but her full name is Tiriti-o-Waitangi Mahana – named after a piece of paper, but what a piece of paper!
Tiri is powerfully portrayed by Miriama McDowell who reaches deep down, somewhere so deep in her hippocampus to find an inner ferociousness and tenacity and clarity of purpose. She fully embodies this ancient being, full of grief and rage and wisdom, yet sardonically humourous, with cackling wry wit. I believed in her – in awe and terror.
“This is Heaven! This is Hell!”
Fortunately, she is accompanied by Tilly, her younger self. She keeps us safe. Nī Dekkers-Reihana, with a miraculous voice and joyful physicality gives us the young woman. She is the lustful maiden, the mother, the woman living in the moment without the weight of history crushing her. She is Tiri, but also her ghost, her companion, the joyful essence of life. And she’s hilarious! To Tiri sex is merely lust manifest. But to Tilly it is… in the moment… heat and passion… sheer physical pleasure, leading to… well… the entire audience needed a smoke when she finished!
Tiriti-o-Waitangi Mahana. This is her story. Hers alone. The men she loved. The children they made. Life in the beautiful valley. But some of it belongs to all of us. The wars. The land grabs. Progress. 185 years of love and loss, of promises betrayed, victories and defeats and the indomitable belief that the good things, the right things, are worth fighting for.
At least half the dialog is in Te Reo Maori. I probably have a typical Pakeha familiarity with the language, the common words and phrases, that’s all. And yet, both Tiri and Tilly are so expressive and the play so well written, I never felt left out of the story. Enough is in English, especially when one of them is addressing the audience, which they often do. And this play is written for Maori and Pakeha, both. To my ears, the Te Reo became a poetic, almost musical soundscape, a sensory glimpse into the incomprehensible.
This incarnation of Tiri: Te Araroa – Woman Far Walking is director Katie Wolfe‘s work. Her vision has taken a classic and reinvented it, working with Witi Ihimaera to create an aethereal masterpiece.
Of course this is delivered with the help of the ever unsung technical and artistic crew – who’ve done the grunt-work creating their universe. Most notably Jane Hakaraia, who did the lighting design and Owen Iosefa McCarthy who created the stunning visuals. Kingsley Spargo composed the original music and designed the astonishing soundscape.
Tiriti-o-Waitangi Mahana is 185 years old. From the days when Maori ruled the land to MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke interrupting Parliament by leading a haka and tearing up a copy of the Treaty. The story is not ended. It goes on and on. It is a Maori story and a Pakeha story – together and separately. There is a future for us all.
Tiri: Te Araroa – Woman Far Walking
6-23 November
ASB Waterfront Theatre, Auckland
Tickets are available HERE
Veronica McLaughlin
All photos by Andi Crown
