Vivid spectacle(s) of the Baby Kahu story

BY JANE BOWRON

OPINION: Good grief, is Miriama Smith ever out of work?

The comely actress who made the Aged Parent a happy man when she danced the light and sexy fantastic on Dancing with the Stars has graced our screens on Sunday nights playing a rather too-young mother in Maori TV's Kaitangata Twitch.

On Wednesday night on TV3 she took on the role of Donna Hall in the real-life dramatisation of Stolen: The Baby Kahu Story, in which she donned the signature huge, siren-red glasses the high- profile Maori lawyer favoured at the time her daughter Kahu was kidnapped.

Having a prop of that magnitude is both a curse and a blessing and, indeed, if one had been watching the drama with the sound off and was not au fait with Hall's distinctive facial furniture you could have been forgiven for thinking you were watching a comedy sketch.

When Hall went out for a stroll with baby Kahu and was set upon by a balaclava-wearing, gun-toting kidnapper, one half expected the notoriously feisty lawyer to remove her glasses and beat him off with her headlamps.

Indeed, in the wash-up after the arrest, Terence Traynor, the kidnapper, confessed that he had initially set his sights on Hall but decided against it as she was bigger than him, and too spirited to boot.

Hall's husband, Sir Eddie Durie, was played by the ubiquitous George Henare, but his role was not given the weight of Smith's, who the camera turned to again and again to register any change in the stoic tilt of her turned-down mouth.

The eyes have it in moments like these, but unfortunately the windows to the soul were hidden behind spectacles so enormous they made Deirdre Gig Lamps Barlow's seem like pince nez.

When Hall informed detective Inspector Stu Wildon, in charge of the case, that she wasn't the birth mother of the baby, that Kahu had been whangaied out to her by her kid sister, the plot thickened.

Or rather the necessary extra layer to make the drama compelling enough to warrant dramatisation was added.

The real parents of Baby Kahu turned up at the Hall-Durie residence only to be told that there was no room in their bourgeois inn because the police had moved in.

The poor cousins, as it were, had to go down the road to a motel and their fraught concerns had to take a back seat to those of the famous couple the media had fixed their gaze upon.

The real father of Baby Kahu summed up the action down at the Hall-Durie HQ as an "out of control party with gatecrashers" as he furiously packed his bags and spirited his family home, far from the madding crowd.

Who didn't feel for the birth mother, who suffered her private grief, regret at her decision to whangai the child, as she took it like a man realising that all that was left to her was to wait in the wings.

In promos for Stolen, the drama was furnished with the "story that gripped the nation" cliche, and it is interesting that the current fashion for recreating real-life Kiwi dramas, those stories that talkback feasts and passes judgement upon, are what television is prepared to risk making during the recession (for example, last week's Bloodlines).

These stories already have purchase in the public consciousness and bringing them to life, or dredging them up again, gives us a chance to retrospectively define ourselves, and creates an opportunity to examine police procedures at the time.

Scott Wills, who played detective Wildon, has served on the force before in Interrogation, and there were many other familiar thespian faces who have trod the familiar copper boards.

One imagines that drama schools now must devote a good part of their curriculum to Police Performance 101 as students are taught how to loosen the knot of their detective tie to just the right slack as they slump exhausted over their desk trying to find a lead; and how to allow oneself just a ghost of a smile while fielding questions from the inquisitorial journalist during press conferences.

And what fun to hear the National Business Review treated as the villain of the piece when Hall castigated it for wrongfully placing Hall and Durie on its rich list, though the jury was still out on that one.

Michael Cullen came across as a cold fish as he described the ramifications of the kidnapping as a political hot potato, but all in all the drama kept you there till Baby Kahu was plucked from her hideaway cot and helicoptered home to Mummy Red Specs.

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