Fiji
Larry Thomas
Fiji's Playwright-Filmmaker Gives Life to Untold Stories
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If you were sitting next to Larry Thomas on a plane and you asked him what he does for a living, he’d say he was a teacher. And that he is—at the University of the South Pacific’s Laucala, Fiji campus, where he specializes in Pacific and English literature. Yet many people around the region and, indeed, around the world know Thomas as a playwright and a documentary filmmaker. “Making films and writing plays are what I do outside of work,” Thomas says. “I think of myself as a teacher. I write at home late at night and into the early morning.”
Even working in his spare time, though, he’s been prolific. He has two collections of plays out. One is Three Plays: Outcasts; Men, Women and Insanity; Yours Dearly. The second is To Let You Know and Other Plays. Perhaps his most talked about play—and his most political—is To Let You Know, which debuted in Fiji 10 years to the day after the 1987 coup.
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“I always try to use music in my plays,” Thomas says, “and in this one I used the tabla, an Indian instument, and the lali, which is the Fijian log drum.” The play is about a young Fijian man and a young Indo-Fijian woman who learn to work together. In a crucial scene, Thomas says, “The Indian girl does a classical Indian dance solo to the tabla, then the Fijian man does a spear dance to the lali, setting down his spear as he finishes. Then the couple dances together and the music of the two instruments merges. We worked on that scene a lot and, much to my surprise, it was accepted very well by the audience.”
His two film documentaries, A Race for Rights, about the response of ordinary Fiji citizens to the 2000 coup, and Compassionate Exile, made with Bob Madey, about the Hansen’s Disease colony on Fiji’s Makogai island, have gained him as much notoriety as his plays. He is currently working with fellow USP professor Tarcisius Kabutaulaka on a documentary about the crisis in the Solomon Islands. He’s also working on a play about Apolosi Nawai. “He was the first Fijian businessman and founder of the Viti Kabani (Fiji Company). He died in the 1940s, but during his lifetime he was always a thorn in the side of the British. He’s become almost a cult figure.”
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Thomas, who is of mixed European and Fijian ancestry, grew up in Raiwaqa, an ethnically diverse working class suburb of Suva. He sees the purported ethnic tensions in his country as partly a product of self-serving politicians, who play the ethnic identity card for their own strategic advantage.
What are his hopes for his country?
He looks up and his stage-trained voice is strong. “A part of me tries to be very optimistic that we’ll have a generation that will move beyond the politics of race, that will use its energy to build a country that belongs to all of us.”
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Then he looks down and his voice lowers. “Another part of me just sees it getting worse if nothing is done to solve the problems facing the country—especially crime. There’s a certain lethargy in the police force.” He is silent for awhile.
“There are many good people in Fiji,” he resumes, “who care for the country. As long as they’re there, perhaps there’s hope.” Even with all the wrenching worries about the future, Thomas is not going anywhere soon. “I get homesick if I’m away. I’ll always live in Fiji.”
