Mark HoulahanHurai, by Harry Love (Steele Roberts, 2011) 72 pp. $19.99; Plays 2: London Calling-Blue Sky Boys, John, I’m Only Dancing, Waterloo Sunset, by Ken Duncum (Victoria University Press, 2011) 276 pp. $35.00.
As the book market slips inexorably towards e-book as the preferred format, you wonder what market remains for that print anomaly, or anachronism: the play-text. Beyond the realms of first-year set readings at university or in high school class-rooms, does anyone actually buy and read plays? Professionals who read looking for product do, of course, but how many people seriously programme plays in New Zealand? Surely no more than say fifty tops. Not enough to sustain proper book print-runs, you would think. Yet you do still see books of plays displayed in leading bookstores like Unity. Writers’ Festivals seldom include playwrights, and you really have to hunt around to find texts for sale of any plays associated with Arts Festivals. All the more credit, then, to Victoria University Press, a stalwart of play publishing for decades, and to Steele Roberts. Both publishers must consider that there is some kind of market.
Play-texts, actually, in England anyway, were available from the 1590s onwards, often selling like hot cakes outside theatres next to actual sellers of hot cakes; and since then successful plays have always found a later life in print sought out by readers for entertainment as well as drama groups. Scholars note that Thomas Bodley, whose collection founded Oxford University’s famous Bodleian library, refused to buy plays, considering them to be ephemera. Many might now disagree. And yet there remains something innately perverse or ambivalence-making about the reading of a play-text for its own sake. The fictions and nonfiction works reviewed on this Landfall Review Online site, along with most of the poetry discussed, is designed for the reading eye. Effectively a solitary reader is the target market.
Some plays were of course written not be performed but to be read, most notably Milton’s 1671 Samson Agonistes. Yet the four plays reviewed here are not such closet dramas. Three of them have been performed with considerable success live on stage; only one awaits a brave producer. And, though all four contain passages of bravura writing, they are deeply theatrical, and gesture towards effects which could only be realised in the theatre. In Ken Duncum’s case, these effects are musical. All three draw on pop music classics from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. Catchy tunes from those eras are heard on stage, and at certain points sung by members of the cast. In Blue Sky Boys and John, I’m Only Dancing what you get is, effectively a quasi-musical. Blue Sky Boys has been a hit with audiences everywhere it has been staged. The play cadenzas to a climax with a brace of Everley Brothers tunes and a soaring rendition of ‘Bye Bye Love’. Noel Coward famously praised the extraordinary potency of cheap music, and Duncum, or his performers, would channel this irresistibility to good effect. Foxtrots and Flagons, the romp with heart devised by Ross Jolly and Alison Quigan, roused similar popular affection. There as well evocative music is linked to a time of great change. The sweet sounds of old time rock-and-roll being swept aside by the British invasion of the bouncing Beatles and then the swaggering Stones. What should the Everley boys do? Rough themselves up, Jagger-style, or risk being trapped forever in aspic and Brilliantine like Cliff Richards?
Some plays were of course written not be performed but to be read, most notably Milton’s 1671 Samson Agonistes. Yet the four plays reviewed here are not such closet dramas. Three of them have been performed with considerable success live on stage; only one awaits a brave producer. And, though all four contain passages of bravura writing, they are deeply theatrical, and gesture towards effects which could only be realised in the theatre. In Ken Duncum’s case, these effects are musical. All three draw on pop music classics from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. Catchy tunes from those eras are heard on stage, and at certain points sung by members of the cast. In Blue Sky Boys and John, I’m Only Dancing what you get is, effectively a quasi-musical. Blue Sky Boys has been a hit with audiences everywhere it has been staged. The play cadenzas to a climax with a brace of Everley Brothers tunes and a soaring rendition of ‘Bye Bye Love’. Noel Coward famously praised the extraordinary potency of cheap music, and Duncum, or his performers, would channel this irresistibility to good effect. Foxtrots and Flagons, the romp with heart devised by Ross Jolly and Alison Quigan, roused similar popular affection. There as well evocative music is linked to a time of great change. The sweet sounds of old time rock-and-roll being swept aside by the British invasion of the bouncing Beatles and then the swaggering Stones. What should the Everley boys do? Rough themselves up, Jagger-style, or risk being trapped forever in aspic and Brilliantine like Cliff Richards?
Waterloo Sunset jumps to 1980, when the punk tidal wave washed as far as, well, Waterloo Quay in Wellington. The sloganised music was as menacing and urgent as a battle cry, as London Calling the title of this second volume of Duncum plays suggests, but the adolescent characters affected by it remain confused as the curtain comes down, on the cusp of uncertain tomorrows. The trick of perspective is like that in Mad Men. Their future is our past. We are what they will have become, the ultimate in audience irony.
Waterloo Sunset and Blue Sky Boys are both thoughtful and dramatic, and Waterloo surely deserves more productions than it has yet received. These are beautifully-observed studies of unhappy Pākehā New Zealanders: young, yearning, unhappy with their lot. They would like to imagine a different future, but they only have the sounds of global pop to think of it with. They are crying out for a decent McGlashan or Finn brothers riff.
John, I’m Only Dancing, as if you haven’t guessed, is underpinned by glam-rock era David Bowie. It is built around a series of musical tableaux devised by a teacher, in which Ziggy Stardust is performed live at school. It sounds as absurd as Mr G’s musical in Chris Lilley’s classic Australian show Summer Heights High, but the school I went to in the 1970s staged all the big rock musicals, Tommy, Godspell and the rest, on the spurious grounds that they were religious.
In the school Duncum imagines, the sounds of freedom are championed by a new teacher, an old boy of the school. He forms a passionate relationship with one of the boys and takes on the crusty headmaster. Duncum remarks with chagrin that the play has yet to be performed (and his introductions to all three plays are highly engaging pieces of self-reflection), but I wonder of the play could be brought to life. Would we buy a teacher/student relationship as valid and not just icky? Would the musical sequences looks like a cut price version of Mamma Mia? And will anyone be brave enough to schedule it in order to find out? Again full marks to VUP for at least making it available, should anyone risk it.
I read Harry Love’s play in typescript and wondered if anyone would stage a piece set in early colonial New Zealand and which describes, at its climax, a human sacrifice. But the play has been staged at least twice, in Dunedin and in Wellington. In terms of Love’s career it’s an outgrowth from his extensive series of performable-yet-accurate versions of Greek and Roman plays. Then, too, it’s a useful addition to New Zealand-based adaptations of classical plays not by Shakespeare. Like Duncum, Love provides an excellent introduction to his own text. Hurai uses elements of The Bacchae, but it isn’t a direct version of Euripides. Love uses characters who are historically familiar to New Zealanders, and gives them a new, Greek-style frame.
In the school Duncum imagines, the sounds of freedom are championed by a new teacher, an old boy of the school. He forms a passionate relationship with one of the boys and takes on the crusty headmaster. Duncum remarks with chagrin that the play has yet to be performed (and his introductions to all three plays are highly engaging pieces of self-reflection), but I wonder of the play could be brought to life. Would we buy a teacher/student relationship as valid and not just icky? Would the musical sequences looks like a cut price version of Mamma Mia? And will anyone be brave enough to schedule it in order to find out? Again full marks to VUP for at least making it available, should anyone risk it.
I read Harry Love’s play in typescript and wondered if anyone would stage a piece set in early colonial New Zealand and which describes, at its climax, a human sacrifice. But the play has been staged at least twice, in Dunedin and in Wellington. In terms of Love’s career it’s an outgrowth from his extensive series of performable-yet-accurate versions of Greek and Roman plays. Then, too, it’s a useful addition to New Zealand-based adaptations of classical plays not by Shakespeare. Like Duncum, Love provides an excellent introduction to his own text. Hurai uses elements of The Bacchae, but it isn’t a direct version of Euripides. Love uses characters who are historically familiar to New Zealanders, and gives them a new, Greek-style frame.
The prophet in his play, Papa, is based on the Northland figure Te Atua Wera, the first Maori to forge a syncretic faith based on Christian scripture, and to see the Bible as prefiguring Maori destinies. Papa, like Te Atua Wera, leads his follower to worship a serpent God, Nākahi. They practice rituals beyond the knowledge of new Pākehā settlers. Papa by design is not the Dinoysus we see in Euripides — he is not, for example, a shape-shifter or a gender-bender. But he is dangerous, and the innocent and unwary can get hurt.
Love’s play is engaging to read, capturing your attention wholly. Greek scansions are hard to rework in English, and the issue of how to write a verse play in English without sounding like inept Shakespeare is a long-standing curse. Here, we get shifts of line length: short and staccato for the choruses, a fluid eight-syllable line to carry much of the dialogue. The tonal register moves frequently, which it needs to, as a problem with the measured verse play is that it can can often stick in the ‘poetic’ in such a way as to prevent you hearing any of the words. Huria is lively and elegant, not giving your eyes time to glaze over and taking a suave approach, I thought, to presenting its challenging themes. Like Euripides, Love doesn’t attempt to judge between ‘Christian’ and ‘Pagan’. Instead, as any dramatist worth his salt should, he invests each of his characters with his own eloquence, and that, winningly, allows them to make their case.
MARK HOULAHAN is Senior Lecturer in the English Programme at the University of Waikato. He frequently reviews live theatre events for http://theatreview.org.nz/.
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