Remember the Unruly Tourists? They’re back, on stage and screen
Tomorrow, the first episode of Stuff’s new web series Unruly is released. Today, producer Alison Mau takes us behind the scenes on the project, which starts with the summer news story to end all – and ends with the opening night of The Unruly Tourists; the most controversial opera ever staged in New Zealand.
When I first heard of New Zealand Opera’s new production, it was as if, for a moment, my brain was melting. A full-length opera, about the weirdest few weeks in New Zealand’s recent news history? Had there been a more audacious move in the arts in Aotearoa?
At that mind-blowing moment in 2021, comics Amanda Kennedy and Livi Reihana (Te Arawa, Nga¯ ti Raukawa) – aka The Fan Brigade – had already been writing the libretto (the script) for The Unruly Tourists for months, and had questions about journalism. We’re writing an opera, they said in a message, and the lead character is a reporter. Stupidly, it took me until after I’d answered their questions, to ask one blindingly obvious one of my own. What opera?
I’m not a hardcore opera fan, and might not have given much thought to NZO’s repertoire – but I know a cracker yarn when I see one. A re-imagining of the events of January 2019 – when an ‘‘unruly’’ family set New Zealand’s sense of outrage at litterbugs, schemers and con artists absolutely on fire – was being brought to the stage.
That was a story worth telling.
Did I remember them, the tourists? You bet I did. In that pre-pandemic summer of 2018/19, there was that story, and only that story (or so it feels, looking back). If you were under a rock, or on holiday with no wi-fi that summer, here’s the original events in short:
A family of travellers left a trail of litter at Auckland’s Takapuna beach after a picnic on January 13. When challenged by concerned beach-goers, the group responded with threats, including one from a small child:
‘‘I’ll knock your brains out.’’ Footage of the altercation on Facebook lit a fuse of affront nationwide; but that was just the start. As the family moved down the North Island, tales of their behaviour kept coming; they fled restaurants without paying after allegedly putting ants and hair in meals, trashed hotel rooms, and stole items (including a Christmas tree) from a petrol station.
By then, the family was being pursued by media and the public. Facebook pages set up to track their movements drew hundreds of comments, many of them abusive.
The family claimed they were being bullied, and had abuse – slurs like ‘‘gypsy scum’’ – hurled at them by bystanders.
Politicians got involved – including then-Auckland mayor Phil Goff, who called the travellers ‘‘worse than pigs’’ in a radio interview. A change.org petition demanding their deportation drew 10,000 signatures.
The group was eventually served deportation notices and most of them left the country in late January; but at least one – James Nolan – stayed behind, running from police warrants for fraud, assault with a weapon and reckless driving. In an encore that could not have been written better if it were fiction, Nolan skipped bail and the country on February 26, talking his way past Customs using someone else’s passport – to which he bore, apparently, only a passing resemblance (reports of his death in the UK in August 2022 also made headlines here).
Yes, all the above sounds ridiculous – like a Saturday Night Live sketch strung out over a month. It’s easy to forget the intensity of feeling all of New Zealand seemed to share at the time. But, as a nation, we were obsessed, and that’s something we had to examine in the documentary series Unruly. It’s one of the themes the opera also tackles.
The first thing I did after that brainmelting moment in 2021, was lure awarding-winning producer/director Jo Raj to a meeting at a wine bar to ask what she thought of the idea of a documentary following the opera’s development. I did this in a breathless monologue with my fingernails digging into my palms. Did she think there was anything in it? Fortunately, Jo also knew a cracker yarn at first glimpse.
[Jo] ‘‘I said, how can there not be something to follow in this? Who comes up with an opera about a bunch of tourists that everyone in New Zealand at the time – to be fair – hated?’’
She said yes. New Zealand Opera did too. And then – more controversy. In midMay, after we already had three days’ filming ‘‘in the can’’, news of the new opera first appeared on Stuff. Within a week,; a third of the NZ Opera Board resigned. The cause remains in some dispute; at the time, Witi Ihimaera denied any connection with the new work, but said he’d seen ‘‘a huge upswelling of discontent and confusion about the artistic direction of the company.’’
Others, some of them hugely respected in the opera world, were more vocal. Celebrated New Zealand-born tenor Simon O’Neill told media the premise of the new opera was racist (he walked back that claim in the same radio interview) and classist – a project not worthy of taxpayers’ support.
I exchanged several emails with O’Neill, who was not keen on rehashing the comments he’d made.
Instead, O’Neill raised questions about use of public funds and pay structures at NZ Opera, which received $9 million in funding from central government in 2021.
Unfortunately for us, O’Neill did not want to be interviewed – and as an observational documentary needs faces and voices to introduce such issues, that line of inquiry ended in something of a dead end. One person who did say yes, was former head of music at NZ Opera, Lindy Tennent-Brown, who is a veteran of the Royal Opera House in London (and many others) and an internationally respected voice tutor and pianist – she is without doubt one of this country’s foremost opera experts.
In Unruly, Tennent-Brown poses her own questions about the nature of the project – is it opera or music theatre? And is this a story the New Zealand taxpayer should be forking out for?
We gathered other experts – sociologist Professor Paul Spoonley talks about what lay beneath our collective hatred of the tourists; RNZ Mediawatch host Colin Peacock about the media pursuit; board member Te Oti Rakena (Nga¯ puhi, Ngati Ruanui, Ka¯ i Tahu) about the risk and reward of NZO’s gamble; and of course, writers Reihana and Kennedy, cast lead performer Te Atamira Jennifer WardLealand, composer/conductor Luke Di Somma, and the man who started it all – NZO general director Thomas de Mallet Burgess.
Much of the public criticism of the opera project was aimed at de Mallet Burgess, who’d joined NZO just weeks before the tourist group arrived. In Unruly, he argues a story from living memory – a ‘‘somewhat Shakespearean’’ story – is very much in line with NZO’s kaupapa. And he has no truck with suggestions the production is judging the tourist family.
‘‘I don’t feel it’s my place to make a judgment. As a theatre-maker, I feel it’s my place to reflect a heightened version of what happened, and then let the audience work their way through it.’’
Nevertheless, social media went wild, again. Many opera aficionados were furious – and some people got entirely the wrong end of the stick and assumed the tourist family was coming back.
Covid-19 intervened all along the way; the opera (along with our project) was put on ice after the Auckland Arts Festival 2022 was cancelled. The writing team plugged in via Zoom, the cast was chosen through video auditions. It’s only in recent months that the machine has chugged back into life in a whirl of rehearsals, staging, costume fittings and filming.
After two years of controversy (much of it before the piece was even written), The Unruly Tourists has its premiere on Thursday at Auckland’s Bruce Mason Centre. We’ve been there every step of the way, trying not to get in the way. The reviews of The Unruly Tourists, the opera, won’t be in until later this week but holy moly, has it been a wild ride.