The Whale Rider, Once from that tribe

The Whale Rider, written by Witi Ihimaera, tells a story of a little girl who’s been hated by her grandfather but finally been recognized by him and became the leader of the tribe. The story was fill by myths, struggles, admiration and whales. This is a beautiful story even though the 3rd person perspective seems kind of confusing. If I want to perform the Whale Rider or transform the story to a play, there will be lots of things for me to do. Firstly, the characters that I would highlight are Kahu, Nanny Flower, Koro and Rawiri. Those four characters are already important roles and structured the whole story of the novel so that I wouldn’t abandon them. However, I wanted to highlight another figure, who is Kahu’s dad. Porourangi, Kahu’s father, wasn’t so important in the novel. However, I feel like it’s his ignore, somehow, that made Kahu eager to Koro’s love since he was the only male who can take place of the role of a father. Since Porourangi wasn’t that close to Kahu and he wasn’t always at home due to the new family he had, Kahu can only insist on absorbing love from Koro, even if he doesn’t love her due to her gender at all. Thus, I wanted to show Porourangi’s ignorance through the play version of the same story. Besides the characters that I want to highlight, the figure of the whales is also important in this story. In the stage, since it’s impossible to have to whales, I would decide to let two people with some whale models to show the existence of the whales and the two people who hold them would speak as the whales. They really need to speak out because I also wanted to highlight the story of the whales in the original version. It, thus, might show the reason that Koro insist on finding the leader so much. For the costumes, I would make them to wear like some peasants usually and wear in formal sometimes. For example, actors should wear in formal when Kahu is going to give a speech about their tribe and leaders at school. There should be a projection of the view of sea when Kahu rides on the whale and there should be sound effect as the sea as well. Then, for lighting, since the whales are dying at night, it should be a little bit dark and weird. I want to highlight the scene when Kahu gives a speech. Thus, she should be in upstage and stage middle while the others who listened to her speech is at stage left and right and downstage around her. The seat of grandpa should right be in the middle so that everyone can see that it’s empty. I thought the audiences would also be worried when they stare at the seat but nobody has come. Lastly, if I were to transform The Whale Rider into a theatre version, I wish I could do it well. I wish I can show the struggles between and showed each figure’s emotion through the theatre version.