Will Judith Collins be taking Dean Parker and the Auckland Theatre Company to court?

Polo by Dean Parker
Auckland Theatre Company
SkyCity Theatre
Until February 28

Will Judith Collins be taking Dean Parker and the Auckland Theatre Company to court? That’s the thought which will be uppermost in some people’s minds on seeing the playwright’s latest play, Polo.

Much of the play’s action centres on Gillian Hancock (Lisa Chappell), the National MP for Clevedon and her developer husband Mungo (Adam Gardiner). The political references appear to be a mixture of Collins' political adventures along with that of other politicians with a series of faux pas, conflicts of interest and personal indiscretions. Jacinda Ardern gets mentioned and there is a reference to a pony tail pulling incident.

However, this is not a play about politics and politicians but rather one about the various tribes of Auckland. Scenes at developer launches and the polo club are balanced up with scenes in a crummy Eden Terrace flat. In both cases, the individuals are seeking some sort of fulfilment and meaning to their lives and even through the ending is supposed to provide some sort of epiphany, things are probably not going to change.

There is actually not much about polo. The game is there in the background but it is really just  a metaphor for the life – the struggles, the glamour, the game plans and the manoeuvring. Into this world of manoeuvring and duplicity Dean Parker inserts some clever plot lines and some up-to-the-minute wit with clever one-liners as well as some extended comic narratives.

In addition to Gillian and Mungo, there is their daughter Harper (Hannah Paterson), her best mate Annabel (Katrina Wesseling) and her hapless brother Kerrisk (Taylor Barrett) who is also the boyfriend of Harper.  There is also the enthusiastic South African polo player Jaap du Plessis (Harry McNaughton) and the flighty PR person Sally Hunt (J J Fong).

At the lower socio-economic end of the scale are the two flat dwellers – poet / philosopher Amber (Kalyani Nagarajan) and Matui,(James Maeva) a waiter at the various polo club events who brings home the odd bottle of wine as well as the odd person from the other side of the tracks.

Most of the characters are caricatures and these need to be carefully massaged. They can make for great comedy but they can also come across as superficial and banal.

Adam Gardiner’s Mungo, a developer who votes Labour is invested with a nice complexity with dubious values but ones that he acknowledges while Lisa Chappell as his MP wife can only speak in platitudes with a political smile the whole time.

J J Fong as the ever hopeful, upwardly mobile Sally Hunt has some great lines – “I haven’t drunk tap water in 10 years” but she has an overblown take on the punchy PR wannabe that lessens the impact of the lines.

Hannah Paterson and Katrina Wesseling provide some of the most entertaining segments of the play as two vaguely, vacant wealthy selfie-generation bimbos who see themselves as on display the whole time indulging in-circle silly behaviours.

The best performance though is provided by Kalyani Nagarajan, with her mixture of the whimsical and pragmatic approach to life. She comes across as the only real, three-dimensional characters in the play with sensitive naturalism

Polo has got enough jokes and comment to make the evening worthwhile. The plot lines may seem a bit thin at times and the ending a bit inconclusive but the opening night audience e thought it was better than going to a polo match.

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