Holding mirror to Kiwidom
Theatre-maker Kate McGill has a theory about the popularity of reality TV. She reckons it owes part of its success to our desire to see ourselves and hear our stories on screen even though many of those end up veering toward the unreal.
While she hasn’t made reality TV, McGill is in a unique position to reflect on real-life stories.
Much of her career has involved making verbatim theatre, where plays are created from the exact words of real people interviewed about specific events or topics.
Now she’s staging her latest onewoman show, Weave — Yarns with New Zealanders, which features the words of 20 people, men and women of all ages and occupations, from Invercargill to Northland. McGill describes Weave as a fun but thoughtprovoking way to consider what being a New Zealander is all about.
“The idea is to unpack the myths about who we are and whether there’s any such thing as the ‘New Zealand character’ — who are we as individuals and collectively? I think New Zealanders want to see themselves reflected back to them.”
McGill cold-called strangers, spoke with a handful of friends and used organisations to contact suitable interviewees. She spoke with around 30 people including a stoic South Island farmer, a politician (she won’t say which one), a sex worker, a Filipino immigrant, teachers, nurses and a builder. She was surprised and flattered by how willing they were to talk, saying interviews usually started with questions like “tell me about the first house you lived in” or “tell me a bit about where you were born”.
“And people would just talk; they were [very] generous,” says McGill.
“Some [of their stories] were funny; others were incredibly sad and personal. One woman talked about . . . becoming a mother at the same time she was losing her own mother to a terminal illness.”
The frequency with which racism was raised surprised McGill.
“I didn’t expect to hear so many comments about racism or experiences of feeling like the ‘other’. I thought people might have wanted to talk more about where they were from or their upbringing, but this issue is clearly on people’s minds.”
McGill, who’s appeared on TV shows and films like The Brokenwood Mysteries, Girl Vs Boy and Gaylene Preston’s Home By Christmas, travelled to New York in 2010 to work with the Tectonic Theatre Project.
Specialists in verbatim theatre, Tectonic’s most famous play is The Laramie Project about the 1998 murder of gay student Matthew Shepard. It’s become a modern classic and was followed by The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later.
McGill has directed both in New Zealand. She’s also performed her own original verbatim plays Job, about New Zealanders’ jobs, and Munted based on on real experiences of the Christchurch Earthquakes.
“I think it’s a wonderful way of story-telling; people listen in a different way when they know they’re hearing [real people’s] words”.