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Impressions of the Theatre

Bruce Mason

I Have lately been assembling a collection of essays and theatre criticisms written over 10 years, to be published as "Occasions: the sights and sounds of a decade." My terms are loose; an occasion can be sitting in the theatre, listening to the radio or to music, travelling or reading a book. Even my decade is a somewhat hazy celebration, lasting from 1953 to 1964.

I had not looked at many of these pieces for several years. Assembled, they prove an impressive testimony to the vigour of theatre In New Zealand. For the size of our population, activity is enormous and wide-ranging; the programme of Unity Theatre would not disgrace any company in the world and, indeed is a great deal more adventurous than many of the widest acclaim. Embedded in the theatre section-far the largest—there will be found an almost complete history of the seven years hard labour of the New Zealand Players in imposing a professional theatre circuit on the country; not every production is reviewed but all but two or three of their 25 odd are there, along with little homilies in which chiding competed with encouragement, representing our hopes in them and misgiving at their policy and progress.

The Players were killed by a combination of factors, chiefly perhaps, the enormous and ever-mounting costs of touring, rigorous and exhausting for actors and stage-crew, but almost as much by the ingrained and aggressive parochialism of our community, once the initial impact of the company had lessened. This we share. I learned in London some years ago with Australia. There I heard Paul Rogers, an eminent English actor recently returned from Australia where he played Hamlet and Lord Foppington in Vanbrugh's "The Relapse" for the Australian Elizabethan Trust in a national tour, tell this story, which I quote in the book. "Well, Mr. Rogers, we thought your Hamlet quite good, really, very interesting indeed, but my goodness, if you could only have seen the Woolloomooloo Thespians' production! Now there was a Hamlet!" And when the New Zealand Players were forced by rising costs to present trash like "The Mousetrap" and "Spider's Web," which the local societies might have done as well or better, then the company had had its chips.

The amateur, whose heroic work in our theatre the book lovingly celebrates, nevertheless, here and elsewhere is throttling the professional. No one doubts that for ballet and opera and symphonic music, professionals are essential and amateurs unendurable. I have always held that for theatre this is equally so. But this view is, to say the least, unpopular in amateur circles. I have never understood why though I have been the target of much criticism for earning by work in the theatre, about enough to keep myself, a cat and a dog. It has something to do with getting too big for one's boots (a major crime in God's Own Country), with putting on airs and showing off, and—most grievous of all!—an implied loss of soul. I see the militant amateur as too often smug, complacent, provincial and parochial. So many of them never leave Woolloomooloo.

For my sins, as they say, certainly not yet to my profit, I have dedicated my energies to the theatre in New Zealand as I think the book will reveal. I have served it in almost every capacity: as actor, writer, producer of plays, operettas, revues, operas and pageants: as stage manager and scene designer, as stage hand and scene painter, as critic for various dallies, weeklies and quarterlies. This says nothing at all and would be no one's business but my own, did not this activity imply the theatre capable of it. If "Occasions" has any qualities at all then they are those of the theatre it celebrates. No critic can be better than the theatre he serves.

For two years, from March, 1958, to March, 1960, I was dramatic critic for the Dominion, Wellington. I found it an absorbing, ill-paid and sometimes maddening task. I learned, on a visit to London during my term of office, that in a year I had seen more new productions than my London colleagues; if I had reviewed nothing as good as London's best. I had certainly seen nothing in New Zealand to equal their worst. The nature of the theatre here, half amateur, half professional, half local, half overseas meant that on successive nights, I might see a performance by an eminent overseas artist, Emlyn Williams say, a local production of the highest distinction, say Richard Campion's "Oedipus Rex" for the University, an overseas company of appalling trashiness,—let it be nameless—or a pathetic and pitiful attempt at West End sophistication in the suburbs. My relationship with my editor and sub-editors was total war, an endless pitched battle for space in which I rarely got my way, understandably enough; I was ruthlessly and constantly cut and never consulted. Yet I did my job; sat with the same air of slightly pop-eyed absorption at a hideously uncomfortable community centre for some idiotic trifle as I would on plush at the Opera House for a fine visiting company. I had two full-scale controversies, one with Googie Withers over "Roar Like A Dove": I wrote an Open Letter to her and her urbane Open Reply made the Billboard: Actress Replies To Critic, a "famous first" in the New Zealand theatre; the other was with Sir Donald Wolfit who challenged me to the twentieth century equivalent of a duel: a public debate on the function of the critic, which I accepted, and from which Sir Donald later withdrew for reasons made blisteringly succinct in a private letter which he forbids me to make public. I enjoyed it all and would have missed none of it And to those who find ludicrous the spectacle of a grown man gravely noting the efforts of New Zealand-born actors to encompass the styles and cadences of distant Europe, I commend the scenes in Thornton Wilder's "The Bridge Of San Luis Rey," a fine and unjustly neglected novel, where, in the Lima of the seventeenth century, the actress known as La Perichole nightly strove for excellence in classical Castilian before a provincial and largely uncomprehending public, and nightly willingly suffered the strictures of her lover and mentor, Uncle Pio, who badgered, cajoled, battered and drummed her to the highest reaches of her art, for no reward but their mutual satisfaction.

How was one to become professional in the New Zealand theatre of 1960? I saw only one way, I suggest a typically Kiwi response, to do it myself. Thus "The End Of The Golden Weather" which I have now performed over 300 times In every sizeable town in New Zealand, except for Blenheim. Alexandra and Gore, in Edinburgh and London. I, too, strove for excellence and if by professional one means care and dedication to the purpose in hand, the determination to give every audience, however small or large, one's best, to be unaffected by public Indifference (at first almost total) or private fatigue, then I claim the title.

Professional theatre and professional standards are now essential to us. Only so can we explore ourselves and discover, in the sense of revealing, who we are. In the absence of a film industry, the theatre is our chief, in fact our only, avenue to such knowledge publicly celebrated. The huge activity to which my book is a witness has still no vessel in which it can be contained and this vessel must be professional fashioned and at least partly paid for by the state. Ballet and opera and symphonic music are now largely state-subsidised activities, as they must be; I argue for the same attention to theatre. I happen to think that for a time, the theatre must be regional rather than national in its affiliations, working from the centre to the periphery rather than the Players' disastrous plan from outside in; no centre was ever established. There are signs, in Wellington and Dunedin, that this policy has begun.

An established framework can then seek and solicit playwrights, for only with them can the theatre be mature and creative. Our orchestra, ballet and opera have already elicited remarkable works from composers and choreographers which could not have been planned or written without the framework for them to be performed in. Critics—and let me say that New Zealand dramatic critics are, for the most part, quite execrable and a disgrace to their calling—must make excellence their target and be satisfied with nothing less; if they are honest men, they will acclaim It when they see it. Out with soft-soap, apology and kindness. These are death to creative activity. Above all, attention, the closest and most dedicated. In 10 years, we may have a living, vital theatre and Justify the tribute I once heard of New Zealand overseas and had gently to disclaim: "the Athens of the South Pacific."