Back to Te Maunga is a magnificent new Māori play which follows the reunion of two friends on the ten-year anniversary of their best friend’s passing. It’s a story of grief, friendship and forgiveness told by two performers in one tight eighty-minute act.
Grief is messy and complicated at the best of times. In Back to Te Maunga, we meet Isaac and Tāne ten years into their grief. The two long-time friends come together in the hunting cabin they all used to visit in order to mourn their friend Jake, pouring him a cup of whiskey alongside their own. The play investigates men’s mental health in a genuine and nuanced way that I hope will resonate with male audience members.
In those ten years, a chasm has emerged between them. In a very real way, it is a physical chasm as Isaac has moved to London while Tāne has stayed home in New Zealand. But it is also an emotional one, as they have fallen out of touch with each other. The story is filled with a desperation to delay confronting of emotion, littered with unanswered phone calls, late appearances and overdue family visits.
The play asks the question of how you choose to respond when life gets hard: Do you run away or do you stay? In a way, the choice is inherently doomed. If you stay, you’ll still change. If you run away, you’ll still bring yourself with you. As someone who often chooses to run away, I felt Isaac’s desperation to put physical distance between himself and the problem. The temptation to run away and reinvent yourself is too strong. You feel you must give in.
Despite this distance, Isaac and Tāne have the strength of friendship to pick up where they left off. They chat and joke like not a minute has passed, with the kind of natural humour that’s hard to recreate again afterwards. Joel Te Teira’s script traverses expertly between comedy and drama. The conversation flips between the silly and the serious, just as friends would do.
Jordan Selwyn and Joe Dekkers-Reihana deliver equally excellent performances as Isaac and Tāne. It is impossible to separate them. As in all two hander plays, there is no room for the two lead actors to hide in this piece. But there is no need to worry, as Selwyn and Dekkers-Reihana deliver both comedically and dramatically. They made me laugh and cry in the space of eighty minutes.
In a landscape often plagued by cookie cutter stories keen to reach as many people as possible by riding on a wave of vagueness, Back to Te Maunga shines due to its unwavering commitment to detail. This is most evident in Te Teira’s writing, as the script is filled with particulars from the specifics of Māori language and customs to the nitty gritty behind Isaac’s Dorrito chip packet design day job. Life is found in the details and Te Teira understands this exceptionally well.
This appreciation of details is also evident in the play’s design elements. The biggest design highlight is Zoë Rouse’s phenomenal set design. Walking into the modest space at the La Mama Courthouse, it feels like you are entering the hunting cabin along with Isaac and Tāne. The three walls of the cabin are littered with their objects and memories. The broken light still hangs unfixed on the wall.
Keegan Bragg’s direction must be applauded, for such a cohesive production could not have succeeded without a competent director. Bragg’s directorial vision is clear throughout the piece. Other highlights include Lyndall Grant’s fight choreography, evoking a fierce, explosive tension between the two men, and Harrie Hogan’s simple yet highly effective lighting design.
Back to Te Maunga succeeds because it is not afraid to enter scary territory surrounding grief and death. We so often treat grief like a competition amongst ourselves. Who knew the person best, who gets to be the saddest. Sometimes we even treat it like a competition within ourselves, we tell ourselves we should feel more or less sad than we do. But grief is not a competition. Grief is survival. Stories about grief always endure because we do desperately want to know what the answer is. Of course there is no answer. But we want one anyway.
Having had another work Ngātai performed in a reading by Melbourne Theatre Company and shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award, I very much hope to see more of Te Teira’s writing performed in the Melbourne theatre scene in the near future.
Rating: Highly recommend
Play: Back to Te Maunga
Writer: Joel Te Teira
Theatre: Antipodes Theatre Company
Director: Keegan Bragg
Starring: Joe Dekkers-Reihana (Tāne) and Jordan Selwyn (Isaac)
Dates and venue: La Mama Courthouse until 22 March 2026