Nights In The Gardens Of Spain

Tonight’s local Sunday Theatre is a psychological drama about a family in crisis as Kawa, a successful businessman, is forced to reveal his lifelong secret: he is gay. The drama is adapted by screenwriter Kate McDermott from Witi Ihimaera’s novel of the same name and directed by Katie Wolfe.

Kawa (Calvin Tuteao, Shortland Street) is the man who has everything. He's a corporate high-flyer, with a beautiful wife Annabelle (Nathalie Boltt, Bloodlines, District 9) and two children - 16-year-old Sebastian (Pana Hema-Taylor, Boy) and 7-year-old Miranda (newcomer, Miriama Jane Devantier). Kawa has been brought up by his parents, Hamiora (George Henare, Once Were Warriors) and Grace (Vicky Haughton, Whale Rider) and his whanau with a strong sense of duty, marked out as a child with special gifts who was expected to eventually take up great responsibility. He received a first-class education in both Maori and Pakeha worlds, and moves easily between the two.

Up until now Kawa has been able to lead a successful double-life, but now Hamiora is retiring and wants to give him the mantle of leadership. At the same time, his lover Chris (Dean O'Gorman, McLeod's Daughters) is pushing for more recognition in Kawa's life, how can Kawa deal with the collision of his two worlds?

Nights in the Gardens of Spain is the result of a creative collaboration between two production companies owned by Maori women - Nicole Hoey's Cinco Cine Films and Christina Milligan's Conbrio Media.

Hoey explains, "we got together with Witi to talk about how we might do it for television," she continues, "one of the things we talked about was taking it away from the gay coming out story set in the context of AIDS and set it in 2010. We also wanted to make it more about the husband and wife and to give it a Maori base, because the book is not set in the Maori world."

"And once you do that, you change his whole environment. He might be working in a corporate environment in the city, but when you change everything about his nature, you change everything about who the other characters in the drama are going to be. His whanau and his place within that become very important."

Hoey says placing it in the wider context of Kawa's family also enabled the story to bring another pressure to bear on Kawa - his anticipation of their reaction to his coming out in terms of their expectation for him to become the tribal leader.

"Inside Maoridom there is a sense of ownership by aunties, uncles, grandparents over a person, and with Kawa it was decided very young that he would be given the mantle of leadership for the whanau. That's why changing the central character made it so much more difficult for him to make the move because he didn't have ownership of himself. The iwi, the hapu, the runanga, his whanau all had a stake in his future because his future was their future".

Director Katie Wolfe says that while similar situations do arise, many Maori families do not have such an issue with gay family members. "I'm very clear that we're not making a blanket statement about Maori attitudes to homosexuality. It's specific to this family."

Hoey says: "The bulk of Maori we know are highly successful and live in houses like this one but we don't show it, perhaps because of the tall poppy syndrome."

Ihimaera also liked this aspect: "It doesn't treat the Maori community in the way that previous representations of Maori show us as rural people or as funky replicas of black identity. I really like that this is a middle-class family with a whanau that is half within the corporate world and still trying to retain their own identity as well."

Wolfe was already familiar with Witi Ihimaera's book when she was approached to direct the drama: "Witi's book was an amazing story and it was a great opportunity. I didn't meet Witi until the day before we started shooting. He was incredibly gracious and he looked me in my eyes and said 'This has to be your film'. I think he guessed that I was nervous about telling his story about his coming out. And now that we've finished the film, I feel like passing it back to Witi again. It's very much his story."

Ihimaera says that the re-imagining of the lead character as a Maori man, Kawa, was for him a double-edged opportunity: "The most exciting thing for me was that in the book the main character is European and he is supposed to be an 'everyman' character, but with this particular treatment, because it was to be made by Maori creatives, I had to completely turn my head around and to actually recognise for myself that unfortunately I was going to have to come out twice. Once in the guise of a Pakeha character and then turn that character around and make him into the Maori character that he was supposed to be in the very beginning."

"So that was quite a shock to me because I had always tried to hide, to say 'this is a book that could be about 'everyman', this is not a specific story'. So it is now actually nearer to the truth than I would like to admit," Ihimaera continues.

Rather than being a gay coming out story, or a gay love story: "It's become a very strong story about a whole group of people who are encountering a particular issue - one man doesn't realise what is going to happen when he decides to turn his life around and become somebody else. And by him becoming somebody else, everybody close to him cops the fallout," the writer concludes.

He is reminded of some of the reaction he received from readers of the novel: "In the early days most of the letters I was getting about the book were mainly from young women whose husbands had come out. They were saying 'thank you very much for writing it because now I can understand why he was driven to leave'. They now knew that there was this compulsion in their husbands that wasn't any of their fault."