Oscar Kightley: ‘You get a bit more frightened as you get older’

Why I Made is a fortnightly feature in which artists and writers share the behind-the-scenes stories of their creations with listener.co.nz. Here, Oscar Kightley talks about writing the play Dawn Raids and how job losses contributed to him becoming a playwright.

Oscar Kightley wasn’t even 30 when he changed the face of New Zealand theatre forever. Visceral, urgent and confronting, his play Dawn Raids announced to audiences – many fed on a diet of Brit-lite theatre – that there was a new generation of theatre-makers in Aotearoa who would tell their stories their way.

The first play Kightley had written without a collaborator, Dawn Raids threw a spotlight on the trauma everyday Kiwi families experienced in the 1970s when NZ governments went hunting for illegal immigrants, targeting Pasifika people, who were often pulled from their beds.

It was produced and performed by Pacific Underground, founded by a collective of Pasifika performers and musicians based in Christchurch. That collective, Pacific Underground, is now the country’s longest-running Pasifika performing arts organisation. It is holding a reading of Dawn Raids at Word Christchurch later this month.

Why did you write Dawn Raids?

OK: The Dawn Raids were such a big and awful thing that happened to our community, and it was done by the NZ government. As a young Samoan, I had heard about them [the raids] as I was growing up but there wasn’t really anything about them. There were no books, no television documentaries being made. There were no stories about them, so I was looking around for a subject to write a play about, and this had been on my mind since I was a kid.

I wrote it in 1997/98, and Pacific Underground performed it in 1998. It’s the only play I’ve written by myself. Before then, I’d written a couple of plays with Simon Small, who was also in Pacific Underground, and A Frigate Bird Sings with Dave Fane.

You were a journalist before you started writing plays. How did you make that switch?

OK: I got made redundant in 1990 in the first round of redundancies from the Auckland Star. I thought it was going to be my job for life because that’s the way things were back then. We’d just moved to a new building and new technology was being introduced. I kind of thought I might get made redundant because I’d been told off by then editor Judy McGregor, so I went for a job interview at Independent Radio News.