On Wednesday I went to the opening performance of “Fallout” playing at the Basement theatre.
It’s a play about the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by French government agents, 30 years ago this July. But it’s equally a story about NZ and its people. It was really brilliant. It made me laugh, cry, remember and be glad that Bronwyn Elsmore had written and Jennifer Ward-Lealand had produced a play that did the story justice.
I always feel nervous about how people will tell that story. For me it’s a little too personal to get any really solid distance, but this time I was really glad that my feelings about it matched lots of the younger people from Greenpeace who went – some for whom this really is history. They loved it too.
There are only four actors in the cast and over the hour they become a range of characters from Greenpeace crew to Whangarei motel owners to an old women from Rongelap. The play opens with the story of Rongelap and from that moment and for that reason, I was captured.
The Rongelap story has been lost over the years, buried by the more ‘sensational’ story of the Warrior bombing. The story then moves to the day the Warrior arrived in NZ and her bombing three days later. It is dramatically retold by ‘those’ there at the time.
But the reason why every New Zealander should go to this is because it is about us, it’s as much a NZ story as it is a Greenpeace one. It’s about how Greenpeace and NZ became joined at the hip through this event. It’s about how we, single handed and as a little nation solved the murder mystery and caught the bad guys. The true stories of New Zealanders told by the four actors who easily switch in an out of characters are truly telling about who we were, and maybe still are as a people, willing to stand up for what is right. Go, you will love it and leave I hope loving also this part of our common history.
Here's the Metro Review.
Basement Theatre May 20 – 30 and only $25 a ticket.