New Zealand Writers

KOUKA, Hone

Kouka achieved early recognition with his plays on Maori themes.

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Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998). About the Companion entries View list of Companion contributors

KOUKA, Hone (1966– ), Ngati Porou, Ngati Raukawa, Ngati Kahungunu, achieved early recognition with his plays on Maori themes, the youngest playwright to win the Bruce Mason Award (for Hide ’n’ Seek, with Hori Ahipene, 1992). He is also a short fiction writer, poet, children’s writer and actor, and has worked as a theatre artistic director and in journalism, sawmilling and forestry. He graduated in English from University of Otago 1988 and from Toi Whakaari / New Zealand Drama School 1990. After Mauri Tu, performed and published 1992, Hide ’n’ Seek and Five Angels, he collaborated with director Colin McColl in the popularly successful Nga Tangata Toa, a version of Ibsen’s revenge play The Vikings, performed in Wellington and Auckland 1995. Set on the East Coast in 1916, it deals with family conflicts (a recurrent Kouka theme) on the return to the marae of a war hero, and the dramatic dominance of the woman warrior Rongomai.

Waiora Te U Kai Po (The Homeland) was commissioned for the 1996 New Zealand International Festival of the Arts, revised for a national and international tour in 1997, and published (Huia, 1997) with an introduction by Roma Potiki and afterword by Judith Dale. It includes waiata and haka by Hone Hurihanganui, performed by spirit characters who observe the action in a manner reminiscent of a Greek chorus, but eventually go beyond that to conflict and interact with the living. The play again presents a tempestuous gathering, a birthday party in a sawmill worker’s family who have left their North Island homeland in search of material improvement near Christchurch. It draws irony from the ‘immigrant’ status of the Maori family. The 1965 setting enables social and racist attitudes to be simplified, while the play also shows the complex pressures of social aspiration and of increasingly global culture. Its centre, however, is the plangent sense of disruption and loss of home. RR

The Prophet (2006) completes a trilogy of plays including 'Waiora' and 'Home Fires', and is moving, funny and definitely unforgettable.