The wedding reception is about to go horribly wrong.
Jack Charles plays Mick, Bunurong elder and the hirsute uncle of the groom, who shakes our hands at a guest table festooned with love-heart balloons and gum leaves. A three-piece band plays guitar and drums on the stage, which is draped in glittery red strips underneath the grand organ pipes of Sydney Town Hall’s Centennial room.
Two huge screens flash photos of what father of the bride Robert (Tainui Tukiwaho), our MC (“Maori of ceremonies”), calls “our beautiful black and brown family sitting under a tree” – mostly snapped with awkward cheesy grins and half-shut eyes.
We thought we were just here to witness a piece of conventional theatre – but instead the audience become wedding guests, funnelled into the internecine fireworks as the family thrashes out a thorny question: should Australia or New Zealand become home for the happy couple, Aboriginal consultancy entrepreneur Kane (Mark Coles Smith) and Maori corporate hotshot Hera (Tuakoi Ohia)?
Country and continuation of culture are crucial for both the mother of the bride Sylvia (also Robert’s ex, played by Lana Garland) and the mother of the groom Ruth (Lisa Maza), who stands her ground on a dais at the opposite end of the long room. “Follow your heart my son,” she implores. “It will lead you where you need to be.” We applaud, and laugh nervously.
When the happy couple make their late arrival on the red carpet, we toast the prospect of their offspring: “all the Maorigines to come”. But as their little secret suddenly becomes known to all in the room, accusations of “whoring bitch” let fly. “Oh you Maoris, think you’re so effin’ cultural!” shouts Ruth. Sylvia, standing now in front of the head table, won’t let that insult stand: “I’ve had yeast infections with more culture than the lot of ya!”
The chaos that ensues is masterfully controlled by co-directors Rachael Maza – artistic director of Indigenous Australian company Ilbijerri theatre – and Tukiwaho, who co-wrote Black Ties with Torres Strait writer John Harvey. A co-production by Ilbijerri and New Zealand’s Te Rēhia theatre, the ambition of scale here – 13 performers including the band, and a drastic and effective flip of the stage and point-of-view for the second act – is augmented by the ambition of bringing people together, as we are encouraged to talk with the strangers on our tables.
But in the first act, we’re just flies on the wall, watching Kane and his intended best man Jerome (Dion Williams) travel across the ditch to get permission to marry Sylvia and Robert’s daughter – fearful of a Once Were Warriors-style violent greeting. The lads are granted an impromptu pōwhiri, a Maori welcome ceremony, which becomes enmeshed with the disco classic It’s Raining Men, sung by the fabulous best friend of the bride, trans woman Shannon (Brady Peeti).
This early cross-cultural moment is a little like that outback scene in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, when didgeridoos and campfire mash with I Will Survive. Later, under a disco silver ball and clutching a bottle of red wine, Shannon will bring her own lovelorn drama to the wedding reception; sisters will fight and unite around our tables, but the band will play on.
Comedy can convey a host of serious issues, including problems common to many cultures – such as absent fathers. Black Ties also wants to remind us that, while these are stories of colonised peoples with similar histories, Australia’s history of forced Indigenous child removals – and the lack of a Treaty – continues to resonate as unfinished business. The play wants to move us beyond cultural stereotypes, and to show us we have more in common than we suspect.
The first act could do with a little tightening, but has many wonderful moments setting the characters up for the big wedding showdown. Mick, who is gay, seems the most drawn from real life: we see Jack Charles in beret and trench coat, unsuccessfully trying to hail a taxi, and we learn that – like Charles – Mick works with prisoners and is a member of the stolen generations. At one point, a fellow cast-member can even be spotted reading Charles’s terrific autobiography, A Born-Again Blackfella.
As the travelling troubadours through the first act morph into a wedding band, and casual clothes morph into bow ties and brocade, a mash of love songs segue us through – from the Home and Away theme to Daryl Braithwaite’s The Horses. The audience is finally encouraged to dance with the players. If only we all moved as one more often.
Black Ties plays at Sydney Town Hall for Sydney festival until 18 January, then at Perth festival 13 to 16 February, Asia TOPA festival in Melbourne 21-29 February, New Zealand festival of the arts in Wellington 4–7 March, and Auckland arts festival 11–15 March.
