The Big Screen with Michelle Langstone

Hariata and Tamati Moriarty on adapting Waenga as a radio drama

Siblings Hariata and Tamati Moriarty developed Waenga through workshops with senior Maori students at Wellington high schools, building the play around the recurring theme of young people wanting to understand a political world that often feels deliberately confusing. The show played to sold-out audiences at last year's Kia Mau Festival and has since grown into a theatre marae production directed by their father, Jim Moriarty. They've now adapted it for radio, and join Culture 101 to discuss the process ahead of its debut on RNZ National.

Ellie Harwood on why gaming still has a toxic problem for women

Ellie Harwood co-hosts Extremely Casual Gamers, a podcast she started with friends Chris Key and Guy Mansell in 2023 to normalise gaming and strip away its stigma. She's also part of Viva La Dirt League, the Auckland-based YouTube sketch comedy group built around gaming that has millions of followers internationally yet remains little-known at home. Harwood talks about stepping away from gaming as a teenager because it felt coded male, the toxicity that still greets women's voices in online lobbies, and why getting more women into game development could change the kinds of games that get made.

Brett Haylock brings Cheeky Cabaret to Auckland, born from a 30-year-empty cinema

Brett Haylock co-created La Clique, the cabaret show that sold out within three days of opening in Edinburgh more than twenty years ago and went on to win Olivier Awards and play the West End, Broadway and Paris. While touring, he stumbled across an abandoned picture house in Brunswick Heads, on the New South Wales coast, that had sat empty for 30 years. He bought it on instinct, and it's now home to Cheeky Cabaret, a circus and burlesque show so popular it sometimes sells more tickets than the town's entire population. He brings a "best of" lineup to the Auckland Cabaret Festival, the show's first stop outside Australia.

Pax Assadi's memoir made entirely of his most mortifying memories

After his TV show Raised by Refugees, Pax Assadi was offered a standard memoir deal and turned it down, partly because at 32 he felt he hadn't lived enough to justify one. His solution was Mortified, structured not as a linear life story but as a series of deeply specific, often humiliating childhood memories, including the time he wore a full football kit, boots included, to a school awards ceremony. He joins Culture 101 to talk about why the most embarrassing memories resurface fastest, and growing up doing "New Zealand on hard mode."

Roma Potiki on Robyn Kahukiwa: the masterpiece still missing

Roma Potiki curated Tohunga Mahi Toi, the touring exhibition restaging Robyn Kahukiwa's seminal Wahine Toa series, now showing at Pataka Art+Museum in Porirua. Potiki worked with Kahukiwa on the 1999 book Oriori, and describes an artist whose quiet mastery made you careful around her. Assembling the exhibition meant tracking down works scattered into private collections across the country; two long-unlocated pieces turned up, but one, depicting Hine-nui-te-po and Maui, remains missing. She joins Culture 101 to discuss the search, and what Kahukiwa leaves behind.