The Mooncake and the Kumara

Past Tour: Tour-Makers presented The Mooncake and the Kumara in Oamaru, Nelson and Hamilton in 2015. If you are interested in this show please contact WhySquare. 

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Set in a time when racism is rife in New Zealand, two cultures collide in a tale of love and honour, history and secrets.

Directed by Katie Wolfe, The Mooncake and the Kumara is set 90 years ago in a market garden, where romance blooms among the vegetables.

Rich with myths and fables, music and song, this story is about a Māori-Chinese love affair that will uproot the lives of two families for generations to come.

“The Māori girls are not to blame if, seeing their elder sisters with lazy Māori husbands living in abject poverty, they choose to marry Chinese”  Auckland Star, 5 August 1929.

This is the first New Zealand play to explore the issue of extreme racism faced by Chinese men (at a time when women weren’t permitted into the country to prevent ‘breeding’), while Māori communities were being dismantled, one plot of land at a time.