bReview: Mixtape for Maladies
Words by Amani Sadique
There’s no better way to distract the people of Tāmaki Makaurau from the fact that a brittle economy paired with diminishing job prospects is causing record numbers to flee the country than the Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland Arts Festival. Divine timing, and a breath of fresh air in a despondent climate. The thrilling distractor kicked off on Thursday, and last night I was lucky enough to head along to one of the many arts performances the festival will be hosting over the next month (ngā mihi bFM!).
Riddled with anxiety, we are in the nick of time for the opening night of A Mixtape for Maladies at the ASB Waterfront Theatre, with state highway one traffic being the culprit of our lateness. Once we hurried inside, got past the discomfort of making others stand up from their seats so we could locate ours, and got snug, the humour and charisma of A Mixtape for Maladies’ characters soon eased that anxiety, and switched off my internal monologue. And I wasn’t the only one enjoying the character’s aura, with the audience repeatedly bursting out laughing at the humour the characters had.
Now, what if a single mixtape could unlock a family’s past and reshape the present? A Mixtape for Maladies is set in present-day Aotearoa New Zealand and past Sri Lanka. The performance follows Deepan, a young Aotearoa-born man who stumbles upon an old mixtape in his family home. As he listens through and questions his mother Sangeetha during a podcast they are creating whilst they listen to the mixtape, he unravels the interconnected lives of her family: her father, Rajan, her siblings, Subbalaxmi and Vishwanathan, and her former love, Anton. A Mixtape for Maladies is playwright Ahilan Karunaharan’s (who plays the father, Rajan) compelling new work, which marks the final chapter of his trilogy, which began with TEA, continued with The Mourning After, and now reaches its conclusion with A Mixtape for Maladies. Karunaharan describes the play as “An ongoing artistic excavation of the multiple truths of my motherland’s past. Many of the stories of my Tamil community remain untold and there is very little in the way of public acknowledgement of our nation’s war history. This work is a small attempt to fill that silence.”
Due to our lateness, we missed the start of the first scene, but from what I could grasp, the Sri Lankan family were heading to a fair, and one of the daughters was requesting if they could bring candyfloss back for her, nothing seemed amiss. Before scene two, the second track on the mixtape, we flick back to Deepan and Sangeetha recording their podcast, who narrate us through what the next song on the mixtape resembles, which was Britain’s colonisation of Sri Lanka, the British Ceylon.
The following track was about past Sangeetha’s secret love for a guy at the local general store who plays all the latest hits, Anton. They eventually end up bonding over music, later falling in love. The fourth track consisted of the two performing a stunning dance in his general store, with past Sangeetha’s glimmering sari catching my eye. The family then went on to discuss themes such as sexism within their family, with the jarring noise of shootings making the scene come to a close, which portrayed the start of a devastating 26-year-long civil war between the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Sri Lankan government. “You must have been terrified!” Deepan says to his mother when we transfer back to the two recording their podcast.
Another stand-out scene from the mixtape was where Sangeetha’s sister, Subbalaxmi, voices how she opposes being married off, and longs to keep her independence, so that she can go to university and pursue studies. She eventually leaves home to seek safety due to the war, but when her family try to call her to check up, she doesn’t answer the phone, leading the family to believe she had died due to the ongoing war. The last few songs on the mixtape consist of Sangeetha going into the fine print for Deepan to understand the realities of her war-torn life before she moved to Aotearoa and had him, with a heart-wrenching ending which I won’t spoil. So heart-wrenching that present Sangeetha and Deepan attempt to immerse themselves into the scenes to try and amend the past.
The way the performance was structured, with Deepan and Sangeetha being our narrators throughout, reporting back to their podcast, kept the audience intact and helped maintain the performance’s flow. The director did an astonishing job at balancing the two tones of narration and music, and the show was poignant for me. The overarching motif portrayed was the nostalgia that’s connected to music, and how you can walk a journey through the past with audio. As someone who used music as a coping mechanism when I first moved to Aotearoa, I found parts of the performance resonant and personal. A Mixtape for Maladies is peppered with heartfelt childhood memories paired with hard hitting realism, and a must-watch for anyone who has ever felt torn between two worlds.
The crowd were electrified by the performance and everyone stood out of their chairs to applaud the cast. Whilst exiting, I glanced at women who appeared to be hiding her face in her friend's arms whilst they hugged, and I started to wonder if maybe she was crying as a result of the touching performance. We indulged in some mouth watering authentic meat rolls, which were on offer in the foyer, before heading over to Silo Park’s outdoor cinema where many were gathered watching Wicked - but we were only after the gelato truck we could see, before heading home.
In a time when uncertainty looms, the Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland Arts Festival reminds us of the power of storytelling, creativity, and shared experience, offering not just distraction, but a moment to breathe, feel, and reconnect with our origins. A Mixtape for Maladies is very fitting for Tāmaki Makaurau’s diverse demographic, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has family originating from outside of Aotearoa. Don’t miss this unforgettable journey through Sangeeta’s 1950s’ Sri Lankan past. You can catch the show until 23 March, and tickets are selling fast, so head to the Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland Arts Festival website to grab yours
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