Theatre
Last Virgin in Paradise
Synopsis
The Last Virgin in Paradise: on Marawa, an imaginary island in the South Pacific, the young Hina dreams of leaving, on the eve of her wedding to a retired European psychology professor, who has come to find among the islanders a virgin wife and who treats her as an object. Around her bustle an anthropology mission from Harvard, which would like to photograph her in costume, and her cousin, a feminist educated in Australia, who urges her to leave the island to study. The play, subtitled a serious comedy, deals with exoticism and with the gaze that turns the other into an object.
Context
Published in 1993 and reissued in Suva in 2001 by the Institute of Pacific Studies, the play is the joint work of Vilsoni Hereniko and Teresia Teaiwa. The edition joins to the text notes on the sets, costumes, language and music, an essay by Hereniko on Pacific clowns and a text by Robert Nicole on the invention of Tahiti as paradise. One reader sees in it a play on postcolonialism, otherness and exoticism; another finds its characters sketchy and its plot too short to develop.
Who it is for
A comedy in one act, ninety-four pages long; no French translation has been recorded.
Prizes and reception
A recording, made at the Fiji Arts Club under Hereniko's direction, was broadcast in 1995.
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