Success of Maori Actors Watching Maori concert parties and variety shows, with their incomparable comperes, one often thinks that there should be great opportunities for many Maori people in the more serious stage drama. Last August for the first time, the country's foremost theatre group, the New Zealand Players, staged a play where the three principal characters were Maori actors. It was “The Pohutukawa Tree” by Bruce Mason, and the chief actors were Miss Hira Tauwhare, Miss Mary Nimmo, and Mr Maia Sullivan. Critical Wellington audiences, viewing the play in four performances, were most favourably impressed with the liveliness and appropriateness of their acting and the play will be shown again in various towns later. Subject of “The Pohutukawa Tree” was the conflict in ideas between the older and younger generations of Maoris in the modern world. It tells the story of the Mataira family … Aroha and her two children, Queenie and Johnnie. These three are the only remaining Maoris of the Ngati Raukura living on their ancestral lands at Te Parenga; the rest of the tribe slowly drifted away many years ago as their land was bought and settled by the pakeha. Aroha, the mother, a deeply religious woman, played by Miss Hira Tauwhare, still clings to the great traditions of the past. When the play opens, Queenie and Johnnie (acted by Miss Mary Nimmo and Mr Maia Sullivan) are adolescents, and are beginning to rebel against the restrictions of their home life. Being unprepared for the harshness of the world, both come to grief. But being young and resilient they learn to compromise. Not so Aroha, for her it is different. She suddenly finds her life collapsed and in ruins, and is too old and proud to re-mould it. This then is the story of “The Pohutukawa Tree” which was produced recently in the Theatre Work shop of the New Zealand Players. The cast included eighteen speaking parts, but it was the three Maori characters who were dominant figures and around whom the play revolved and to whom its success is due. These three, with their freshness and vitality, have shown that the Maor has a natural and uninhibited acting talent which was the envy of the rest of the cast. And they have proved that the door to yet one more profession is open to the Maori. Miss Hira Tauwhare, formerly of Masterton and now of Feilding, took the part of Aroha Mataira Mrs Mary Nimmo (Queenie) Mr Maia Sullivan (Johnnie) Miss Hira Tauwhare (Aroha)