The Road That Wasn't There

Born out of a desire to tell a ‘real Kiwi story’ abroad,Footnote ⁴The Road That Wasn't There was originally devised by Wellington theatre company Trick of the Light for the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Incorporating over fifty puppets, ‘shadow play and live music’, The Road That Wasn't There is described as ‘a curious tale’ that is ‘drawn from the twitchy edges of children's literature . . . for intrepid children and adventurous adults’.Footnote ⁵ In 2013, the company toured the play throughout New Zealand, premiering at the Wellington Fringe Festival, where it was promoted as a Kiwi nostalgia narrative with a Grimm sensibility.Footnote ⁶ After winning ‘Production of the Year’ at the Chapman Trip Theatre Awards (among other accolades), the play had a return season at Wellington's Circa theatre in July 2014.

The Road That Wasn't There is a story told in eight chapters. Gabriel is a clerk working in Australia when he is summoned to return home to the tinpot town of Saint Bathans in the Maniatoto district of Otago, in the South Island of New Zealand. In an attempt to discover the root of his mother's peppy lunacy and penchant for larceny, Gabriel encourages her to tell him the story about how she met his father. This flashback, played by rod-and-shadow puppets, is the crux of the narrative. The young Maggie discovers, through the guidance of the seer figure ‘The Blanket Man’, a magical ‘paper road’. This leads her to the eccentric father and son players staging an ambitious dramatization of the life of Captain James Cook. The romance between Maggie and the son, Walter, leads inevitably to parental outcry, destruction of the paper road map and the fearsome transformation of Walter into ‘Retlaw’ – a truly terrifying character. Through the powerful intervention of the Blanket Man, Maggie is freed from the grip of Retlaw and the narrative returns to the older Maggie, still searching for the paper map to lead her back to Walter, Gabriel's father.

In many ways this production exudes a distinctively European aesthetic. The rod puppets and shadow play – riding on the wave of revivalist ‘home-craft’ art forms and nostalgia for overtly theatrical aesthetics – speak more to the realm of European pageantry and folk traditions of Peter and the Wolf or Punch and Judy than to anything indigenous to New Zealand performance. By drawing on an age when Scottish settlers traversed the rugged South Island of New Zealand, the performance creates a piquancy of familiarity with the original Edinburgh audiences. What situates this text firmly in a Kiwi vernacular – apart from the location and yokel southern dialects – is in the integration of Māori language, mythology and iconography throughout.

Māori culture and untranslated Te Reo Māori – or Māori language – has an idiosyncratic role in this production. It is used for referencing flora and fauna, such as where Maggie complains of having found a takahē – a native bush hen – nesting in her agitator washing machine. There is the invocation of the local myth of the kopuwai, a giant taniwha (monster) who lived near the Clutha River seeking out humans with a pack of two-headed dogs, a scene which seems more to evoke the dark folklorist fantasies of the Brothers Grimm. The play also adopts the motif of a paper pīwakawaka – or fantail – as a friendly guiding presence. One of the key bird companions of the demi-god Maui on his great quests, eventually causing the trickster's death by awakening the goddess Hine-nui-te-po, the pīwakawaka are regarded in Te Ao Māori (the Māori world) as messengers or harbingers of death; during tangi (funerals) their presence is as ancestors guiding the recently departed back to the gods.

The most significant use of Māori iconography as a means of creating a folklore feel is in the characterization of the ‘Blanket Man’ puppet. The Blanket Man is a time-transcending guardian of a liminal otherworld; a Rastafarian-cum-Gandhi figure with a cheeky Te Reo Māori-inflected tongue and powerful ‘ninja’ skills. The connotation that this puppet establishes with the figure of Ben Hana is unquestionable for many in the Wellington audiences.

These Māori elements all give the text a quirky locatedness bound in the landscape and mythology of New Zealand, but are also framed within a nostalgic vision of colonial encounters. While drawing on elements of Te Ao Māori, the play does not offer the distinct energies of Māori performance. There is nothing Māori in its inception or praxis – it is far from the syncretic performance modes established by Māori practitioners Hone Kouka and Briar Grace-Smith,Footnote ⁷ or the revival of the traditional Māori performance practice of Whare Tapere initiated by Charles Royal.Footnote ⁸ The simple fact is that, although there is a form of puppet/performing object practice in pre-colonial Māori performance called karetao,Footnote ⁹ the puppets used in this play are clearly drawn from European and Asian influences. The use of Māori language and mythology and the puppet itself can therefore be seen as a kind of tokenism that comes not only with the absence of a cross-cultural exchange, but also through the kind of ‘Māori-ness’ with which this puppet is endowed. The puppet lifts the text into contemporary New Zealand with his distinctive ‘Bro' lingo and his recognizable doubleness with a real-life (now departed) parallel. Yet this contemporary allusion actually served to reinforce Māori culture today as backward: rather than showing a vision of indigenity rooted in the past, it suggested that Māori have in no way progressed, but rather devolved. The performance – specifically in the relationship between the puppet and the puppeteer – also lacked the integrity or care which this doubly transformative transaction necessitated. It was a one-way cultural encounter.

Who was Blanket Man?

Bernard or Bernett Hana arrived in Wellington, New Zealand, in the summer of 2001 and lived rough in the windy capital for over a decade. Details of his history are sketchy and tragic; his life on the streets is often cited in the media as penance for the drunk-driving death of a friend and his criminal record is alleged to extend over seventeen pages.Footnote ¹⁰ His notoriety had much to do with his physical appearance – having dreaded hair, wearing only tattered jeans or a loin cloth and, of course, the blanket that bore so much symbolic value. He was enigmatic and eccentric; he often spoke in riddles and was believed to worship the sun-god Tamanui Te Ra, a claim that suited his mythic presence in social and media discourses. Over the years, Brother earned a sort of celebrity status. As the protagonist in the documentary Caretakers of the Land,Footnote ¹¹ he talks about his desire to dig up the land to feed the poor, and while students lauded and even parodied his rebellious public drinking, dope-smoking and semi-nudity, many Wellington locals also regarded him as an unpredictable public menace.Footnote ¹²

Brother exposed the deep fissure in the clean/green ideology of 100% Pure New Zealand.Footnote ¹³ He was a very real and raw marker of the effects of poverty, drugs, alcohol and cultural marginalization in a country where homelessness is still considered a choice.Footnote ¹⁴ But he was also cast as a local anti-hero, packaged and endorsed for a multitude of political campaigns, social media outlets, and art, music and even commercial products. In 2007 a group of young people dressed up as Blanket Man for the annual Wellington Sevens Rugby tournament.Footnote ¹⁵ He had Facebook and MySpace profiles set up in his name and T-shirts were produced with his image on them. Following his death in 2012, the Tuatara Brewery manufactured a ‘Blanket-Man beer’ in his honour, local artists created limited-edition Blanket Man screen prints and a Blanket Man skateboard deck and another Facebook page was created where people could ‘Apply to be the next Blanket Man’.Footnote ¹⁶

In the article ‘World Famous in Wellington: Blanket Man and Contemporary Celebrity’, Bronwyn McGovern and Mike Lloyd assert that the people of Wellington showed interest in Brother ‘not because he is a somebody in the sense of a quasi-celebrity, but because he is some body’.Footnote ¹⁷ In other words, the public were fascinated by Ben Hana because of his very real, very visceral presence. In this sense, The Blanket Man puppet in The Road That Wasn't There is a disembodied version, a distilled, blurred and sanitized representation of a real person not known but frequently constructed by many. The absence of his real body in this text creates critical questions about agency, appropriation and propriety in performances that transcend – rather than exchange with – other cultures.

Settling Aotearoa/New Zealand

To understand the various ways this play is ‘unsettling’, it is important to acknowledge the effect that human settlement – and re-/unsettlement – has had in New Zealand in political, cultural and geographical terms. Voyaging from other Pacific Island bases, Māori first came to the islands that they knew as Aotearoa – ‘the land of the long white cloud’ – between 800 and 1200 CE, initially in pursuit of the now-extinct giant bird the moa.Footnote ¹⁸ By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, small bilateral whanau (extended family) groups had developed regional social units, or hapu, across the nation, affiliating and defining themselves through relationships with certain landscape features: mountains, lakes and rivers. Scholar of Māori studies and psychiatrist Mason Durie writes of how these tribal settlers ‘set about to work with, rather than against, the environment, and to develop rules for conduct that would sustain future generations. Aotearoa became home’.Footnote ¹⁹

European adventurers and explorers were followed by entrepreneurial traders, missionaries and, finally, settlers, soon rendering Māori a minority population in a territory renamed ‘New Zealand’. A cessation document, the Treaty of Waitangi, was signed by Māori leaders representing various iwi (tribes) in 1840 as a means of ‘safeguarding Māori interests from “unscrupulous entrepreneurs” through the imposition of British law’.Footnote ²⁰ There are two versions of the treaty, in English and Te Reo. These are not exact translations, with the most critical deviation being the implication in the English version that the queen sequestered ‘all the rights and powers of sovereignty’ over Māori, while in the Māori version iwi offered the Crown te kawanatanga katoa, or the complete government over their land in exchange for the promise of protection. The understanding in Article 2 of the Māori version was that Māori would retain tino rangatiratanga or highest chieftainship over their tribal lands, home and taonga – treasures. While the chiefs who signed the treaty expected to maintain a power-sharing or partnership model with the British Crown, the accord effectively only made it impossible to sell Māori land to anyone but the Crown, thus ‘protection’ was couched as paternalist opportunity. Māori refusal to sell all of their land, despite heavy pressure from the Crown, resulted in a series of conflicts now termed ‘the New Zealand Wars’. The outcome was widespread dislocation of Māori from land, customs and leadership,Footnote ²¹ with the collapse of a rural Māori economy after the Depression, resulting in a mass diaspora to the urban centres of New Zealand. By 1976, over 80 per cent of Māori were urban-based.Footnote ²² Durie asserts that, for Māori, urbanization ‘diminished access to those institutions and skills that nurtured a positive identity, so that being Māori was measured more by deficit in comparison to the Pākeha middle-class than by any return of a secure Māori identity’.Footnote ²³ Ben Hana represents the most abject contemporary continuations of this urban drift.

A protest movement in the 1960s and 1970s saw Māori gain an assertive voice. The establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975 to address Māori land claims and grievances was key to obtaining or reclaiming Māori self-determination. In the 1980s, a Māori Cultural Renaissance found a number of prominent Māori artists, performers, writers, poets and political figures establishing ‘mainstream’ and global popularity. The Māori Language Act (1987), recognizing Te Reo as an official language, consolidated the idea of New Zealand/Aotearoa as a bicultural nation. While disproportionate inequality remains in sections of the Māori population, success in the political, artistic, cultural and sporting arenas finds Māori in prominent, valued positions of influence in New Zealand society today.

A vital factor in historical cultural dissonances rests on the divergence between Pākeha and Māori relationships with ‘home’. Like other indigenous communities across the globe, Māori unity with the environment is conceived as a heightened ecocentric relationship, where genealogy and geography are integrated in the concept of whakapapa: ‘Human identity is an extension of the environment within which they live; the ancestors are to be found as much in the world around them as in the lives of those long since departed’.Footnote ²⁴ Graham Harris and Percy Tipene write, ‘Māori, as tangata whenua (people of the land), have a special relationship with the land. Just as iwi (tribes) are closely linked by a network of genealogical connections, so are they related spiritually to their ancestral lands’.Footnote ²⁵

This idea of a special relationship with environment is vital to the identity politics of indigenous communities across the globe. Durie writes, ‘Attachment to the land underpins indigeneity, and in Māori society older people have responsibilities as kaitiaki, guardians, of the land. To many, the essence of being Māori is to be found in the nature of relationships with the environment’.Footnote ²⁶ The idea of Kaitiakitanga or guardianship is one of the key differentiations between Māori and Pākeha settlement of New Zealand. Colonial settlers saw the land as needing to be ‘worked’, while Māori understood the obligations that humans have to nourish and protect the land in order to be nourished in return. Yet it is this sense of ecological obligation that has often cast indigenous peoples in atavistic tropes within Eurocentric discourses: aligning ideas of sustainability and ‘listening’ to the environment with a culture's inability to move with global progress. I argue that The Road That Wasn't There paints the figure of the ‘Blanket Man’ puppet as a kind of mystical ‘Eco-Māori’, rendering the indigenous people of New Zealand within these contentious primitive, colonialist frames.

‘Fullas Will See What They Want To See’

The character of The Blanket Man was purportedly created before Brother died in 2012 – initially made as a form of homage rather than a tribute.Footnote ²⁷ During publicity for the Wellington season, the show was presented as ‘immortalizing’ Brother on stage. Writer Ralph McCubbin-Howell is quoted as saying, ‘Who better to draw on than a man who became a legend within his own lifetime?’Footnote ²⁸ He adds that ‘the character of Blanket Man owes more to the myth than the man, but it's a celebration of a Wellington icon’.Footnote ²⁹ The company depicts the figure as one with an insight derived from exclusion – which is distinct from Brother's own perception of his role as being a ‘watcher of watchers’.Footnote ³⁰ Reimagined as a mystical swagman during the colonial era, The Blanket Man puppet is a quotation, a figure conjured from the many myths surrounding Brother's life on the streets of Wellington. Significantly, unlike his real alter ego, The Blanket Man puppet is without a community: he is, seemingly, the only Māori left in the world.

The character is introduced with the jarring preface ‘Rumour had it that he killed his mate in some accident and the guilt had driven him loony’,Footnote ³¹ which, coupled with his quixotic Māori vernacular, creates an ambivalent spirit guide figure. He is described as having hair that ‘hung down like vines from old man's beard and his skin was like old leather boots. People tended to avoid him because he reminded them of their bad luck’.Footnote ³²

The Blanket Man is a rod puppet constructed from papier mâché, replete with woolly dreadlocks and a tartan blanket – perhaps a nod to the Edinburgh origins of the production. He is clearly made to be Māori; while the other puppets are almost exclusively white, The Blanket Man appears brown and coarser in finish. He is voiced by the Pākeha puppeteer Ralph McCubbin-Howell, who uses a clichéd ‘cuzzie-bro’ Māori accent.Footnote ³³ Like Brother himself, the puppet is enigmatic, speaking in riddles and prophecies:

This figure is initially quite intimidating; he is elusive and defensive; it is unclear whether he is on the heroine's side or has been planted to lead her to misfortune. Such ambivalent shifting occurs until the climactic scene, where he emerges as a kind of ‘knight in tartan blanket’, fighting off the zombie Retlaw and saving Maggie's life. Critically, The Blanket Man is constructed as a visionary outcast whose foresight is tied into his special relationship with the landscape, as tangata whenua (people of the land).Footnote ³⁵ In this way, the character lends a sense of the ‘authentic’ to the narrative – a kaitiaki protecting virginal white women from the dangers in the (super)natural realm.

Kaitiaki or ‘Ecological Māori’

In the formative text The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, anthropologist Shepard Krech III describes the character of the ‘Ecological Indian’ as a figure ‘who understands the systemic consequences of his actions, feels deep sympathy with all living forms, and takes steps to conserve so that earth's harmonies are never imbalanced and resources never in doubt’.Footnote ³⁶ As an indigenous ecologist and conservationist, the Ecological Indian – applied here to the First Nation Native American peoples – transcends the mould of the typical ‘hippie’ archetype through a heightened, spiritual connection to place. The figure metamorphoses into an other-worldly soothsayer state, embodying ‘cultural premises about the meaning of humanity, nature, animate, inanimate, system, balance, and harmony’.Footnote ³⁷ Beyond a role as reminding earth-dwellers about the importance of respect for all nature, the Ecological Indian is also a keeper of a ‘mythic’ or romanticized vision of the natural world, shifting beyond a psychic connection to becoming ‘a state of nature’ himself.Footnote ³⁸

The Ecological Indian is, vitally, a troubling stereotype of indigenous culture which is, as Krech asserts, ‘ultimately dehumanizing’, denying ‘both variation within human groups and commonalities between them . . . It makes them seem like an animal species and thus deprives them of culture’.Footnote ³⁹ Krech suggests that this distortion of culture ‘occludes its actual connection to the behaviour it purports to explain’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Rather than elucidating the logic of Indigenous ecocentric practices within local contexts, the homogeneous Ecological Indian is a primordial figure who is situated not only outside the space of ‘everyday’ life, but outside ‘reality’ altogether. Most critical is the fact that this is a construct created from outside indigeneity. Epitomized by images of the tear-streaming ‘fake’ American Indian, Iron-Eyes Cody,Footnote ⁴¹ the ‘Ecological Indian’ is, like the ‘Dying Savage’, a romanticized stereotype of indigeneity formed to confirm Western/Eurocentric ideals about the inherent exoticism, pathos and inevitable demise of the colonized.

Such tropes are often invoked in order to fulfil a desire to endow a fictional space with a heightened ‘magic’ quality. Literary scholar Terry Goldie writes, ‘The text seeking indigenization turns to the consciousness of Other as the spiritual power of the land. What better way to acquire that consciousness than through the contact between white searcher and indigenous sage?’Footnote ⁴² This image of a ‘white searcher and indigenous sage’ is literally embodied (or disembodied) in The Road That Wasn't There. The young white girl is met on the crossroads by a mysterious, brown, time-travelling figure who knows the secrets of the land and the hidden roads that one has to believe in, in order to find. The Blanket Man puppet is made an ‘Ecological Māori’ through his nomadic observations of the changing territory of colonial settlement: ‘I’ve walked across mountains and cities and rivers and watched the world get old and scarred’.Footnote ⁴³ This is also shown in his timelessness, with his unclothed body and the reading of his blanket as a korowai signifying early Māori-as-savage.Footnote ⁴⁴ This aesthetic is critical to the perpetuation of this trope. This sense of ‘savagery’ is reinforced by The Blanket Man's aggressive, unrefined characterization: he is volatile and cryptic, clearly set up as the elusive other in this narrative. As the keeper of a ‘fantasy’ realm, the nature which The Blanket Man protects/guards takes on a mythic quality: it is a portal to spaces outside the ordinary, a dangerous and – scenographically – dark space. This reinforces the anxiety towards the other in colonial construction, with the indigene rendered as an object to be feared and not trusted.

The spirituality of The Blanket Man – his ability to see things that are not really there – supports the fairy-tale morality of the story. Goldie writes, ‘the indigene's spiritual dimension is false either because no such dimension exists in this material universe, or because the true cosmology is one defined by the culture . . . that has produced the text’.Footnote ⁴⁵ As a Pākehā text, this play uses the trope of the ‘Ecological Māori’ – or mystical indigene – to offer a glimpse into the ‘extra-phenomenal realm of the Other’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The comforting proviso that this narrative offers as a children's text is that the presence of The Blanket Man reinforces the fact that the world of this play is not real; he signifies ‘an even more absolute division’ of Pākehā and Māori worlds – an imaginary goblin.Footnote ⁴⁷

Yet it is not overly surprising that the real-life Blanket Man was rendered in these frames. Ben Hana/Brother can easily be perceived as a kind of contemporary savage. He was often portrayed in public, through social media and in commercial enterprises, as a mythic time-transcending figure chiefly because he did not wear clothing, fitting the colonialist vision of Māori in their ‘untainted’ form. He was transformed in the play from a contemporary ‘authentic’ Māori figure into a transitional performing object, one that is both familiar and, however, located aesthetically in a pre-colonial realm. Much of the humour is contained in this interplay between the contemporary – ninja-fighting, swearing, ‘stinking Māori fulla’Footnote ⁴⁸ – and the traditional figure whose special relationship to the whenua (land) makes him able to see a liminal landscape in paper geography. Brother's perceived authenticity is also utilized here for its cultural currency – it adds to the narrative a located, quirky, ‘Kiwi’ flavour. The connotation that Brother had with spirituality – as a devotee of Tamanui-Te-Ra, the God of the Sun – makes his character incredibly quotable in the contexts set out in the play.

The Blanket Man puppet can also be seen as a kind of metonym for a metonym; he stands for the idea of a real body – Brother himself – that was used to stand for a multitude of ideologies and politics: the urban Māori, the savage Māori, the abject Māori. As a homeless person, Brother was, literally, unsettled from his traditional home. His journey to Wellington signified his unravelling; he was seen as disconnected from reality, an anomaly or ‘novelty’ among the perceived clean-green purity of the New Zealand landscape. Brother reminded New Zealanders of their failure to protect not only the whenua (the land) but also the tangata whenua (the people of the land/Māori). Brother represented the ongoing lie of equality promised but never provided by the Treaty of Waitangi.

In the documentary Caretakers of the Land, Brother pitched the idea that New Zealand and AotearoaFootnote ⁴⁹ were two separate entities. While New Zealand was represented by the materialism of city life, by government oppression and inequality – ‘in New Zealand they don't believe in peace’Footnote ⁵⁰ – Aotearoa was a place of freedom where anyone from any community was welcome to live side by side, to grow and reap from the land.Footnote ⁵¹ As a self-appointed citizen of Aotearoa, Brother suggested that he lived outside New Zealand's laws. New Zealand was for Brother, to borrow Martin Heidegger and/or Homi K. Bhabha's reading, a place of an unheimlich place, or a place of unhomeliness.Footnote ⁵² This makes Brother a kind of self-perpetuator of the trope of the ‘Ecological Indian’ – he locates himself in an alternative harmonious place, beyond white laws and hostility and urbanity. To the pragmatic, Brother appeared not to live in ‘the real world’ (but perhaps, given the gritty, often inhumane, conditions he lived in, this imagining of an emerald alternative realm became a necessary coping mechanism). Brother constructed Aotearoa as an alternative utopia, emulated by the paper road town in this play. Importantly, The Blanket Man only exists in the alternate (puppet) text of the play – reconstructed from the visions of an unreliable white narrator (the elderly, ‘dottery’ Maggie). This serves to confirm his fictionality; he is the fantasy of an evident lunatic.

The images of landscapes, maps and roads in this play are also significant to the cultural politics implied within. Dramaturgy scholar Elinor Fuchs writes, ‘Every dramatic world is conditioned by a landscape imaginary, a “deep” surround suggested to the mind that extends far beyond the onstage environment reflected in the dramatic text and in its scenographic representation’.Footnote ⁵³ The mystical pastoral society in this dramatic landscape is loaded with signifiers of Māori culture. These aesthetic elements offer to the narrative nostalgia for the romantic, ‘Middle-Earth’, pre-colonial visions of New Zealand as well as a space for heroism in European exploration across mystical, often dangerous, terrain. Set during this age of white settler (re)discovery of New Zealand, the notions of map-making hold significance in defining Pākeha and Māori relationships: a desire for what was, or what should have been. Theatre scholar Marvin Carlson writes of the ‘metaphor of the map’ as ‘the nexus of language, location and landscape’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The map represents European constructions of ‘place’ in the frames of boundaries and owned zones. Fuchs suggests that maps ‘are embedded in a history they help construct’Footnote ⁵⁵ – often palimpsests showing what used to be (‘former Native Settlement’) as well as renaming (and thus reclaiming) an act of colonial discursive violence. This is replicated in the staging of The Road That Wasn't There, a space littered with maps of New Zealand, marking the various stages of settlement and resettlement of regions through remapped geography. The paper map – the road that wasn't there – also draws on these connotations. The ‘road’ in this text signifies a rite of passage, Maggie's journey from structured childhood innocence into the uncontrolled, volatile world of the adult. The road is thus a ‘grand metaphor’,Footnote ⁵⁶ but one that is drawn from a Eurocentric perspective, where it also functions as a symbol of Western progress; performance studies scholar Arthur J. Sabatini notes the ‘mythos of the road and its relation to civilizing impulses’.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is ironic that, with his associations with this ‘other’ place, The Blanket Man puppet is only the gatekeeper of the utopia; while he is outcast from the actual town, he is never found inside the magical alternative space, but merely living at the crossroads. This self-conscious placement of The Blanket Man in the ‘in-between’ evokes the idea of the inactive indigene: watching the civilization of his culture from outside. He is a kaitiaki without access to the land he is entrusted to protect. He is made powerless by this restriction – he belongs nowhere and can only watch the landscape disintegrate as a passive observer. The fact of his ‘puppet-ness’ only reinforces this powerlessness.

What is also critical in terms of this portrayal of colonial New Zealand is the lack of discursive engagement with the reality of cultural encounters, of the distinction between ownership and guardianship, of dispossession and conflict and forced assimilation. Instead, the white characters are seen to have bravely adapted to the conditions of this wild landscape with a gutsy Scots hardiness that resonates in the depiction of Maggie's parents, in the free-spirit of young Maggie and in the entrepreneurial theatrical touring company. The white settlers have taken on (and in) the ‘Māori-ness’ of the environment while seemingly never having to deal with actual Māori themselves. Māori, it seems, have either moved on (suggesting a nomadic culture not representative of Māori) or, apart from the single elderly seer, died out. This play heralds the emergence of a breed of quirky, white New Zealanders, rising out of the chaos of the primitive land of Aotearoa.

Death and the disembodied

As the ‘Ecological Māori’ is endowed with special spiritual knowledge, the figure of The Blanket Man puppet can also be conceived as a kind of shaman. In order to make contact with the dead, shamans are often conceived as necessarily partially or wholly in this state, as ‘being dead oneself’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In this context, The-Blanket-Man-as-shaman takes on a particularly loaded connotation: not only is he the conduit for the contemporary Maggie to have contact with her past ‘ghosts’, but also the real person who is being represented here through the puppet – Brother – is actually dead. For the white characters, this encounter with an (un)dead being both reiterates the unease of this space and, however, also offers it a sense of ‘magic’ that confirms it as a fantasy or dream state. This association with spirituality as being ‘mythical’ – read, not real – reinforces the ‘unreal’ quality of The Blanket Man as representative of all Māori. Goldie writes, ‘the essence of Other in the indigene becomes ethereal manifestation, an aura of indigenous presence rather than the indigene as material reality’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Blanket Man is only partially there, just as the idea of ‘real’ Māori in this characterization is rendered as myth. The anxiety that warrants the emphasis on the ‘not-real/not-there’ as a comfort to young (or Pākeha) audiences relates to the broader anxieties about what indigenous spirituality means in Western imaginations. Māori academic Linda Tuhiwai Smith explains,

It is much easier to regard Māori spirituality not only as myth, but also, given the aesthetic richness that these ideas offer this text, as a rather delightfully unique folklore.

The absence of the physical presence of Brother himself sees the puppet as becoming the man who wasn't there – the immortal Māori everyman. Yet the fact of Brother's death draws on this representation as a kind of ‘reanimation’ – or retrieval of the lost body. The reanimated body is an act of re-membering a dismembered or brutalized community.Footnote ⁶¹ Rather than conjuring Frankenstein's monster, this idea of reanimation is seen to liberate a lost body or silenced voice. This is where the playwright's claims of ‘honouring’ Brother's memory are strengthened: bringing a person back to life in order to show his worth to humanity. The puppet complicates this. Artistic director, designer and performer Stephen Kaplin suggests that a puppet's nature ‘is a signifying figure for the stage, as is an actor. But unlike actors, puppets are objects . . . material images of humans, animals or spirits that are created, displayed or manipulated’.Footnote ⁶² The Blanket Man puppet could be interpreted as a kind of cross-cultural conduit, suggesting that the playing of a Māori character through a performing object rather than through the actor's actual body is a gesture to ease anxieties about intercultural representation. The Pākeha actor is not playing him, he is playing through him. He is showing rather than being (the) Blanket Man.

The performing object is also regarded – like the post-colonial other – as a figure of ambivalence; Matthew Isaac Cohen describes the ‘uncanny thingness of the puppet, its potent con-fusion of intimate familiarity and alien otherness’.Footnote ⁶³ The Blanket Man is not Brother and yet not not Brother. The puppet represents the disruptive character of mimicry, while also rupturing perceptions about agency and representation. By not playing Brother through his own body, the Pākeha actor is able to defer agency or accusations of appropriation. Yet my own unsettlement comes specifically from seeing a white man physically control a brown character. How is a brown puppet controlled by a white puppeteer much removed from a white performer in blackface?

One of the most unsettling aspects of this characterization from a Māori perspective is the fact that the famous/infamous indigenous person being ‘quoted’ or ‘played’ through The Blanket Man puppet has passed away. Film studies scholar Harriet Margolis asserts that the images of Māori ancestors ‘have a sacred quality’ – that such representations are intrinsically special. They confirm or bolster the ancestor's status and the object/image becomes ‘endowed with the spirit of tupuna [ancestors]’.Footnote ⁶⁴ These ancestors adorn the interior and exterior of traditional wharenui (meeting houses); they are acknowledged throughout whaikorero (formal speech) and korero paki (story) to exemplify their status and presence in the lives of the living. Yet this object is not made ‘special’ in the same way as carvings of the dead are in these spaces; he is fragmented, decontextualized and made ridiculous in a Pākehā construction. By endowing the puppet with the spirit of Brother and then articulating a Pākehā narrative/voice through this object, the text is recolonizing, or dismembering, Ben Hana and Te Ao Māori. This play is, literally, objectifying Brother and, through his characterization as a primordial ‘Ecological Māori’, is objectifying an entire culture.Footnote ⁶⁵

It is also important to point out that Brother did not consider himself to be an advocate for specifically Māori people or issues;Footnote ⁶⁶ the play's creators have ironically projected Brother's Māori-ness into this puppet in order to ‘give body’ to the folklore of the narrative. In inserting an ‘actual’ Māori into the text, the authors shake off the Eurocentric aesthetic of the production, using a figure of deftly located otherness to signify its originality. What does the ‘Māori flavour’ add to a whimsical aesthetic sensibility? It gives it an authenticity that is palatable and witty and odd, while also creating marketable, mythic, non-confrontational spirituality. Māori culture is made into a kitsch, archival, infantilized version of itself, decontextualized for pleasure and familiarity.