Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Weneti

Don Selwyn’s epic rendering is vibrantly alive. The elegant, poetic Maori of Pei Te Hurinui Jones’ half-century-old translation, is subtitled into vernacular English. It is a beautifully costumed and sumptuous staging

Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Weneti / The Māori Merchant of Venice, New Zealand, 2002

Director: Don C Selwyn
Producer: Ruth Kaupua Panapa
Adapted by Don C Selwyn from William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Maori translation by Dr. Pei Te Hurinui Jones

With: Waihori Shortland, Ngarimu Daniels, Scott Morrison, Te Rangihau Gilbert

NZ, 2002, 158 minutes, G

Te Tangata Whai Rawa O Weniti (The Maori Merchant of Venice),  takes a fresh, modern look at Shakespeare’s 400 year-old play, The Merchant  of Venice and finds it is still relevant. Starring Maori actors speaking te reo, is subtitled in easy-  to-read modern English. The design, costumes and music interweave Shakespearean elements with Maori arts in a rich, textured and modern way.

“Don Selwyn’s epic and lavish labour of love could seem like an example of ambition ballooning into folly - a three-hour Shakespeare play? In Maori? But that would deny the richness of the film’s vision, the depth of its resonances and the strangely mesmerising quality of the drama itself. It’s a brave undertaking - the play is difficult for the simple fact of its controversial, if not plain racist, representation of the Jewish character Shylock within a context of Christian loathing (the city of Venice developed the world’s first ghetton, a tiny island with a curfew) - but Selwyn turns it’s problems into advantages. This becomes a Maori play about oppression, prejudice and the pursuit of bloody revenge, all fiercely contested in court. Suddenly, it seems quite apt. Although the Jewish moneylender appears in relatively few scenes, they are crucial ones, and Waihoroi Shortland steals the film as a Shylock who is indignant and mischievous, sly and self-righteous. His two big scnes - negotiating to lend money to Bassanio, and the courtroom climax - are the finest in the film. Depsite obvious race-relations implications, there is less irony from hindsight than you might expect, although, in one subtle touch, the camera cuts away from Shylock and Bassanio to a painting in projgress on which the word ‘holocaust’ appears. The anti-Jewish vitriol becomes most pronouced in the court scene. That Shylock will seek a pound of flesh if Bassanio’s debt can’t be rapid is naturally grotesque, but Selwyn is equally concerned that we feel every sting of the public naming of Shylock as a ‘devil’, a ‘savage’, ‘an inhuman wretch’. At the most basic level, by substituting a Maori for a Jew, the film shows up the arbitrariness of prejudice, and plays to a knowing audience’s sympathies. More surprising is that it plays to such a bold sense of aesthetics. The look is kitsch exotical, or Arabian Nights opulence, where every cent of the budget is on screen and every location is dressed to within an inch of its life. This Venetian world of traders, swindlers, sailors and opportunists feels like 19th-century New Zealand, just as the emphasised courtly protocol and etiquette can also feel Maori. Its pageantry and romantic melodrama, especially in the gentle comedy of Portia (a strong Ngarimu Daniels) and her suitors, may put you in the mind of the ‘Maoriland’ fantasies and fables filmsed in New Zealand by Gaston Melies early last century - films with such titles as Hinemoa and Loved by a Maori Chieftess; films that have themselves vanished into legend. Those films were products of their own outdated prejudices. This comes with a solid history - the play was translated, with other Shakespeares, by scholar Pei Te Hurinui Jones in the 1940s. In the late 1950s, Jones told Don Selwyn that the translation existed and Selwyn made a commitment to perform it - on stage in 1990, before undertaking this film. Notwithstanding a few flat patches and some inconsistent performances, the meaning of that history is visible here in a confidence and exuberance so vivid that it feels like a celebration.” — Philip Matthews, The Listener, 9/2/02

“... Don Selwyn’s epic rendering is vibrantly alive... In the elegant, poetic Maori of Pei Te Hurinui Jones’ half-century-old translation, and subtitled into vernacular English (the full text would have obscured the actors), it is a beautifully costumed, sumptuous staging, making use of locations in and around Auckalnd and paying tribute to its stage origins ... Inevitably it becomes a story of cultural collision, a fact Selwny highlights by making Portia’s home of Belmont an imaginary Maori kingdom called Peremona, where the prevailing Maori protocol contrasts sharply with the cut-throat world of commerce in Venice. In teh mouths of a large cast the text becomes a thing of musical beauty, fixing on the rhetorical and declamatory characteristics rather than seeking to cover it with a veneer of naturalism. That said, Shortland is a knockout as Shylock (Hairoka), a seething mass of passion and rage who contrasts beautifully with the poise of Daniels’ serene Portia (Pohia). The performances are a shade uneven and the runnign time time may be daunting for some; the project was concevied with aims other than quick commerical appeal in mind and so the text was untouched. But the film is rich in sequences of visual splendour - notably the arrival of the Prince of Morocco (Lawrence Makoare) - and the whole is a triumphant celebration of a key piece of Maori culture, not to mention the work of a playwright called Wiremu Hekepia.” — Peter Calder, NZ Herald

Screenings: Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Weneti screened to celebrate Te Wiki o Te Reo Maori, 4-10 July 2011