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Playwright Hone Kouka’s new play about violence against children is winning awards even before it has been performed.
Bless the Child is one of the winners of this year’s Playmarket Adam New Zealand Play Award, which recognises the best in new writing for the theatre.
It shares the award with Centrepoint by Anders Falstie-Jensen.
Bless the Child also won the award for Best Play by a Maori Playwright.
It features a lawyer defending a mother whose child has died while the whanau close ranks.
Kouka credits his mother for challenging him to write the play.
"She went, 'Our people and our whanau are hurting our babies, you've got to get a korero about that out there and just get that part of our conversation because we take responsibility for that.' So that's where the idea of the play came from," he says.
Hone Kouka says the challenge was to deal with the heavy subject matter in a digestible way without it being a lecture, and with all the characters having strong voices.
FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH HONE KOUKA CLICK ON THE LINK
https://secure.zeald.com/uma/play_podcast?podlink=Mjc3MDI=
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