Girls who ‘went up north for a while’ have been part of New Zealand folk lore for generations.

In 1972 Paul Maunder made a 40-minute Ken Loach-style film for the National Film Unit called Gone Up North For a While (with Paul Holmes as the wannabe ‘easy rider’ who got Denise Maunder’s character ‘up the duff’). Just last year we saw Fiona Samuel’s teleplay A Piece of My Heart (with Annie Whittle, Rena Owen, Emily Barclay and Keisha Castle Hughes), adapted from Renée Taylor’s novel, Does This Make Sense to You? It was 1968 when 17 year old Flora Thornley had an illegitimate child and gave it up for adoption …

Set a decade earlier (1958), Pip Hall’s Up North brings us 17 year-old trainee nurse Maggie from Christchurch, who has been sent up north to have her child and adopt it out. In many ways she is the middle class Pakeha equivalent of Queenie (also 17) in Bruce Mason’s The Pohutukawa Tree (set in the late 1940s), intuitively embracing notions of sexual freedom while nurturing romantic fantasies of nuclear family bliss. 

Are there other Kiwi plays that specifically dramatise the hiding away – ‘up north’ or wherever – of illegitimate births? Given none spring to mind, Hall’s three-hander is a welcome and arguably overdue addition to the lexicon of homegrown plays that capture social mores in transition.

By dropping Maggie into the plain farmhouse of a childless couple struggling to stay solvent in a remote farming community – representing country-wide conservative values – as rock ’n’ roll greases the wheels of change in the city, Hall’s has ensured her play resonates well beyond its immediate confines.

I just wish Sean Coyle’s mostly authentic-looking farm kitchen set had made the dimensions beyond its doorways seem as credible in Centrepoint’s largely excellent premiere production, well directed by Rachel House. (With a back wall that close I’d believe a passage way but not a whole bedroom.)

Chloë Lewer delivers Maggie’s determinedly upbeat and optimistic side with lively assurance and gives us plenty of subtext to read in her reactive moments. She just needs to modulate her tone when in close proximity to her sleeping new-born.

Jimmy, the returned serviceman back on the family farm (his two brothers were killed in Crete), is clearly realised by Matthew Chamberlain. Unable to realise his dream of being a competitive middle distance runner, and possibly firing blanks in the marital bed, he resorts more and more to booze, so his judgement becomes impaired at crucial moments.  

Kate Louise Elliot fully embodies every aspect of Evelyn (Evie), the wife and would-be mother. She compels empathy every step of her way with an exemplary ‘less is more’ performance.

Hall carefully prepares her ground, sows her seeds and spreads the proverbial fertiliser to that what is reaped in the final quarter is richly satisfying. There is dramatic strength in Jimmy being the author of his own misfortunes. As for the final twist, suffice to say it’s one that insists we ask ourselves how we’d feel and what we’d do in such circumstances.

Adhering to the ‘show don’t tell’ rule means the many scenes crafted to dramatise the progression of the three-way relationships are not very conducive to staging requirements like preparing, serving and eating a meal (what hard-working farmer would barely touch his dinner?). And the daily routine of mixed farming – mainly Romney sheep for wool but milking is mentioned a number of times – could be made more present in the action.  

The time-shifts are subtly handled, however, and the central focus is where it should be: on the hearts and minds of lives in transition as they confront the small and monumental things in life.

Up North captures many universal and timeless home truths en route to its dramatic and thought-provoking outcome. Thank goodness we have Centrepoint doing the job that should be the core business of all state-funded theatres.  

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Spiffing show! Best baby-tale in the last 2000 years. Several of the whining scribblers who also reviewed this play found it ‘slow in the beginning.’ Bollox.

It wasn’t slow at the beginning, it was simply the same pace, at the beginning, as life always was up there in the north and if you think they were going to speed up life just for you, you can go and jump over yourself. The play is about them, not about you, so sit up and shut up or bugger off. And in this wonderful way you are introduced to the environment of up north.

And the speed, or lack of it, of the beginning gives you an opportunity to watch the enactment of those tiny little stories that make up existence: the crate of beer put on the table by him then consigned to the cupboard under the sink by her. In this unmentioned game of – draughts, may we say? – the battle of alcoholism is conducted daily. Or the patting of the hair as the phone is answered – always by her – for the party line up North is the party line. And you stick to it. If you don’t, what happens in this play happens.  

No concessions are made to the audience; you see more on-stage backs in that beginning than you do fronts – why turn round, there’s dozens of people out there you’ve never seen before: townies. Reality is this way, inwards, facing the sink and the oven – or the drinks cabinet.

Habitué of the said cabinet, Mr Davis, later Jimmy and off-stage Matthew Chamberlain, brings admirable coherence to a role which ultimately has him flying every which way. He is a steady drunk, by which I mean he does not fall over at the apogee; neither does he fall to pieces under threat of bankruptcy or prospect of greater things. In other words he doesn’t take the easy way out – and consequently gives a convincing portrayal of a man who doesn’t (or can’t find) the easy way out. Even his drinking can be modulated according to circumstance. 

Chamberlain’s performance – and that of the two women – gives evidence of talent and damn good direction. Anyway, the farm’s going down the dunny cos he’s a lousy farmer, she can’t get a job – presumably because he’s a lousy farmer – logic works like that up north. (I’m extrapolating from identical West Coast experience.) But there may be a way out of the mire…

And the Way skips in. She’s Dorothy on the other side of the rainbow, tripping out of the sepias of the ‘slow beginning’ of the movie and setting the north ablaze with beauty, energy and colour.

So that gets shot of the ‘slow’ critique. The other slight censure was, as murmured in the bar later: “Oh, it was very good… but there was no humour.” BOLLOX! There was no spoken humour, no gags, no “Bunnythorpe! That actor said Bunnythorpe on the stage, ahahahaha!”; no one tries to match, say, Oscar Wilde’s: “You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell.” No one says it; the play just brings it about; and your reaction is invited.

It helps to remember that an old King giving his Kingdom to two of his daughters who then boot him off it, is high tragedy, but has the precise architecture of high comedy; tweak the emphasis a bit and you’ve got Lear the knee slapper. And also that the first reliable description of Hell is found in a work called the Divine Comedy.

In that wise, this play is very funny indeed. And it begins immediately, despite the reputedly slow start, when Kate Louise Elliot, one of our very best comediennes, bustles droopily into her kitchen to begin the saddest role of her career: Evelyn from up north.

So where’s the humour? Well, initially in the longdrop. Which, in the dark, Maggie, a newly arrived young pregnant girl has to face (or not face, to be strictly anatomical) for the first time. So she begins the creation of her own Basil Fawlty world in which humour is based on horror – and the wonder of this fine play is that she, like Basil, never ever realises it.

The radiant young Maggie – Chloe Lewer, who really is as beautiful as she (beautifully) acts she is – can save Jimmy and Evelyn Davis’s up north farm with the dues her wealthy parents will pay for the parturition and parking elsewhere of her illegitimate child. The father is David, studying to be a doctor, in love and – we are told with no reason to think otherwise (there are no liars in the play) – prepared to stand by Maggie.

But there is duplicity (lies without words, perhaps, in keeping with the theme of unspoken humour), letters are not sent or delivered. On the other hand sentiment’s warm, grim walls of rustic reserve are broken down: “Mr Davis” becomes Jimmy; her citified, probably demon-infested music is accepted; his whiskey is welcomed. Cajoled by her optimism he will take up running once more, at which he was very good.

Life is good: Evelyn gets a part-time library job; the two pounds a week extra brings the freedom of a parliamentary credit card; chocolate is bought, so are matinee jackets. In a tender moment, the baby is felt to kick for the first time. Yep, it’s a baby with kick is that one.

Act II begins with the nursing of Jimmy’s hand; he has protected Maggie from the erumpent attentions of some young predator, and damaged it: “I just wanted to talk to him, I don’t know why he thought…” She obviously often doesn’t. Jimmy’s noble deed has repercussions: Evelyn loses her job; he cannot shear; the gang’s rates are scandalously high; the bank won’t extend the mortgage; “the price of wool is going through the roof.” We hear the banshee laughter of the Basil Fawltys of the cosmos…

The narrative winds around itself, feeding off its own effects to create more; its thread moves from the strange to the surreal to the insane and inevitably into the last resort of imbalance, the real. There, the second last ‘movement’ is so shattering that it is followed by an empty-stage interlude which extends so long it could easily become a ‘Time for a Capstan’ which they doubtless had in theatres in those days. And it gives you time to ponder the avalanche of incident you have witnessed and suppress incredulous laughter (of the sort generated by the unctuous certainty of funerals).

Then, in the remaining ten minutes you gradually become aware, as does Evelyn, of the last, great joke.
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Being sent ‘up north’ somewhere used to be what often happened to pregnant teen-age girls so they could have their babies quietly born and adopted out without wrecking their eventual marital prospects, or shaming their families.

Pip Hall’s play is set back in the early 1950s, when social mores were far more conventional, and people existed in far more socially integrated communities, gossipingly aware of each others’ business, than they are nowadays. There’s a downside to both milieus: for ours, ignorance of and indifference to our neighbours.

Locating her play, written in the ‘noughties,’ within a re-creation of the attitudes of New Zealanders in a decade some of us old codgers are still around to remember is a high-risk heroic enterprise on Hall’s part. Mostly, I think, she gets it right, but in some ways her seventeen-year-old character Maggie would be more at home a decade or two later.

Centrepoint’s is the worldwide premiere production of this play, and, for me, Rachel House’s directing is fine, as is the production generally (the rhythms could sometimes benefit, through settling-in), and the performances of all three actors are splendid. Even so, the play itself, despite its very definite merits, is finally ‘promising’ rather than fully achieved.

‘Up north,’ for Maggie, means that she comes to live, for the months of her pregnancy, with a childless farming couple, Jimmy and Evelyn, on a farm ten miles away from the nearest neighbours, and a couple of hours’ driving away from the nearest little town. For a city girl from Christchurch, it’s a hard ask, and hard for them too, to reach some accommodation to having her at close quarters.

Their main contact with the wider world is via a party-line phone. They are well-meaning enough, generally kind, but obedient to the request from her parents (for no given reason) to prevent any communication getting through between her and her boy-friend. So, not entirely kind, or on her side.

This is a drama rather than a comedy. Without giving too much away – about the plot – that is, I think that broadly the first half works well, and establishes the characterisations. In the second half, a kind of ‘Coronation Street syndrome’ kicks in, in that the complications of the plot require the three individuals to conduct themselves in ways that don’t seem readily compatible with these characterisations. Not in that decade anyway.

Maybe I’m slow, but I didn’t ‘get’ the ending. My wife had to explain it to me later. Uh-oh. This is not the fault of the actor playing Evelyn, Kate Louise Elliott, who has to convey a very great deal, in the final sequence, with no words at all. Perhaps it’s because it requires a certain offstage action from Jimmy, when one has presumed that he’s the kind of man who could talk quite eagerly about doing such things, especially when he’s got a few drinks on board, yet will never actually do them.

These whinges about the play, in its present form, notwithstanding, it is indeed an interesting play, and one applauds its being put on. Chloë Lewer makes fine use of her acting-opportunities in conveying the changing moods and mind-states of Maggie, and her body-language and timing are spot-on. Kate Louise Elliott is excellent as Evelyn, the endlessly busy, frustrated farmer’s wife. Matthew Chamberlain does really well as Jimmy the reluctant farmer, going downhill.

Sean Coyle’s set-design with one main room, looks absolutely right, and serves the play admirably, likewise Nathan McKendry’s lighting, and Ian Harman’s costumes.

Manifestly, Pip Hall is on her way as a playwright, and one wishes her well.
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