Read me something…

My earliest memory of theatre is watching, at the age of five, my father perform in a farce with local amateur group The Piopio Players. He played a character who was hospitalised with a leg in a cast, but wanting to make amour with a nurse on the lower floor, descended out of a window on a rope of sheets. There was an enormous crash, and the curtains closed; when they reopened, he was back in bed with two legs in plaster. When the play had finished, I went onto the stage and looked out the window he had fallen from and still remember feeling a vindication of my assumption, tinged with a sense of play and mystery, for out the window there was a drop of less than a metre to the floor of the War Memorial Hall. 

Being of a nature to not shy away from putting myself forward, I was throughout school and college shoulder-tapped to sing and make speeches and was often given responsibility to organise and create events of drama and music.

After high school, I went to Hamilton Teachers’ Training College, but this lasted only a year before I escaped to Christchurch. I put myself in front of Yvette Bromley at The Court Theatre. She later rang and invited me to meet Mervyn Thompson, playwright and infamous raconteur; we met in his office at the university. He took a complete works of Shakespeare off the shelf and said, “Read me something.” I read Mark Anthony, and he turned to Yvette, saying, “Yes, Yvette, I see what you mean.”

I was on my way.

My first professional engagement as an actor was performing for The Court Theatre in The Pongo Plays, which was held in Christchurch Square during the 1974 Commonwealth Games. Randall Wackrow built a carnival wagon using sulky wheels, which we dragged from the Court Theatre on Worcester St to the Square. Dragged due to an engineering fault which had the wheels mounted on a weak axle, causing them to rub against the side of the wagon to the point of being unable to turn. Ian Gilmour, Francis Edmond, Cathy Downes and I made up the troupe. My elder brother Andrew was in Melbourne at this time and one morning opened the Melbourne Age to be confronted with a photograph of me proclaiming in a red nose and painted costume. Various other engagements with Court Theatre followed through 1974, including my role as the Squire in the musical Canterbury Tales. Dickie Johnston directed and created many tableaux. Beds painted on standing flats had characters standing up in bed, creating opportunities for action, such as the Wife of Bath, played by the inestimable Millie Woods, being seen vacating her own bed to join the Squire. In another tableau, I held a 14-second kiss with Cathy Downes. She was completely professional, of course – not a sigh, not a flutter.

I attended New Zealand Drama School, gaining a place in the 1975 intake. In the summer of 1976, I went on tour with Red Mole Enterprises, playing an eclectic little holiday camping ground show called Vargos Circus. I returned to drama school in March 1976, but when the Moles invited me to join them on a tour of the South Island in July/August, I left drama school, and so began my Red Mole voyage.

Solo theatre has a long-standing tradition in Aotearoa. The true pioneer who crafted a solo work and presented it over 1000 times in all manner of venues was Bruce Mason and his seminal work, End of the Golden Weather.

In 2000, I created Te Tupua-The Goblin, as part of my Master of Arts, which I was doing at Charles Sturt University. I performed the piece for the first time in 2001.

As a writer of plays and opera libretto, I have enjoyed the challenge of considering the history of Aotearoa/New Zealand as fertile ground for material and subject matter. Our history is complex and violent, and there is much about it that is distinctive and unique. The pre-European time is beyond my imagination, but I do know that Māori society was intricate, political, dangerous and learned. Upon the arrival of Europeans, that world changed forever and thus began the ongoing interaction between Māori and colonisers in the battle for the acquisition of land and political control. This history is part of my ancestry, and as a dramatist and storyteller, I relish the many avenues of wonder, valour, cruelty, deceit and decency which is woven throughout these two hundred years. All these stories are mine to imagine and tell. Not all my New Zealand history stories are written for solo performance. Opera, community theatre and drama have all served, but for this particular tale, I hold the void for myself and step forward into the ultimate confrontation, an empty stage, an audience, silence and light. Begin.