Once more actor Stephen Lovatt and director Shane Bosher offer sublime submersion in the eloquence of Bruce Mason’s writings, this time in a compilation called Not Christmas but Guy Fawkes – the companion piece to The End of the Golden Weather. They are being presented in repertoire by Bosher and Lovatt’s ‘Brilliant Adventures’ (in association with the Bruce Mason Estate and by arrangement with Playmarket) at Circa Two under the overarching title, Every Kind of Weather.

Book now for both, if you haven’t already – trust me. This is a precious opportunity in our theatrical calendar. Meanwhile, before I go on to review it, because the titles may be familiar to those who have them on their bookshelves, some clarification is required.

Every Kind of Weather is also the title of Mason’s ‘Selected writings on the arts, theatre, literature and current events in New Zealand, 1953 – 1981’ edited by David Dowling, first published by Reed Methuen in 1986 (four years after Mason’s death). None of those writings are part of this show.

Not Christmas but Guy Fawkes, which has only ever been performed in its entirety by Mason, is included in the Bruce Mason Solo volume (Price Milburn, 1981). It is named for the school playground put-down, “He thinks he’s Christmas, but he’s only Guy Fawkes.” In his author’s note, Mason describes it as “a set of variations on over-reaching, on getting too big for your breeches, with the comic disasters that accrue from overweening aims.” Its four parts are subtitled, ‘Narcissus Observed’, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, ‘Limp Bananas’ and ‘The Conch Shell’ – and are summarised in The Plays of Bruce Mason – a survey (Playmarket, VUP, 2015, pp 34-40). This show includes just the first and last variations – plus a surprise addition.

As with The End of the Golden Weather, the edits – by Bosher – are judicious. This iteration of Not Christmas but Guy Fawkes starts with a very young Mason sensing what his vocation is and ends with his assessment, the year before he died, of how it played out. The meat in this tasty sandwich is a self-reflective, formative and revealing relationship recalled from the last years of primary school that has its denouement in a post-war London theatre.

Because this work for solo performance began as a series of prose pieces (see below), the edited text retains the past tense, so it plays as a more objective remembrance than the more immediate recollection of Golden Weather – which is referred to, here, several times.  

We are not told the opening salvo is called ‘Narcissus Observed’ but the legend is mentioned in passing. This time, channelling Mason himself (rather than the unnamed Boy), Lovatt charms us back to his childhood in Takapuna (not Te Parenga), signalling this is a true account of his prepubescent beginnings as a fledgling writer. Secreted in a flaxbush, “a secret and guilty joy” hidden from the adults on the lawn, he reveals “the images that fascinated me were always those of luxurious bondage”, later to be made manifest in ‘The Made Man’ part of Golden Weather (i.e. his slavish commitment to Firpo). While his wild imagination was tempered by the moral codes he was learning to obey, we delight in its excesses.

Excited by the arrival of a piano in the house, his rapid progress as a musician provoked withering contempt when he showed off his prowess: “Classical music? Bloody queen.” We learn it took 25 years for him to gather the nerve to perform on stage. Meanwhile he wrestled with the exhortations to “be a man”, resisting the compulsion to play football (i.e. rugby) until, “uncompelled, uncoerced,” he discovered its joys with the Royal New Zealand Navy during the war.  

His ’Manifesto for the Unmanly’, rejected by Landfall, includes an account of an initiation rite for new boys at secondary school, especially severe because he was “a swot”. While admitting that his exhortations to “men of my country” where “intolerably lofty and holier-than-thou”, he confronts the potential psychological effects of such neurosis and guilt-inducing experiences by telling a story about a child who stole his lunch, and how he resolved it.

Mason sums up his childhood as “three separate elements: the prodigious or over-reaching, the compassionate and the comic”, perceiving how they might inform his work. That did not shield him from the slings and arrows or outraged letter-writers, however, responding to the adaptation of his play The Evening Paper (the first local drama to be made and broadcast on NZ television). We laugh heartily now, in retrospect, at the moral rectitude of suburban parents.

The moment Mason identifies as the end of his youth is succinctly dramatised non-verbally as the outbreak of World War Two. (The full text reveals he was 17, in his first year at University.)

Lovatt slips into the less-elocuted voice he uses for Golden Weather to regale us with the ‘Conch Shell’ story. That this takes place at Te Parenga suggests this tale is somewhat fictionalised – we can only wonder to what extent. This time, despite describing Ginger Finucane as “the ugliest boy in the class” (primary school, the year before Golden Weather perhaps?), the Narrator’s self-reflection reveals his own unattractive character as one of the mob that bullies Ginger.

It is a vividly told tale that has us squirming one moment and laughing the next, mostly at the flawed Narrator. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, let me just say that Ginger’s one-on-one response to the Narrator’s most egregious action ‘flips the script’ sensationally, with the metaphor of luxurious bondage coming to the fore. Those attuned to Mason’s being gay (see Chapter 15 of The Plays of …) will see rainbow flags aflutter aplenty.

The fluidity and fluency of Lovatt’s performance is a joy to behold as he navigates this deep-felt experience. The final beat, years later, on leave from the Navy in London, may be seen in relation to Mason’s own failure to make it as an actor in Britain. (Enough said.)

And so to the surprise addition, scripted verbatim by Bosher from the TVNZ Kaleidoscope interview Mason did with Helen Paske in the last year of his life, and broadcast the following year (see The Plays of… ‘Epilogue’). We are left to ponder the lot of an artist who, despite his CBE, was treated in his lifetime as ‘a prophet in his own land’ by professional theatre companies that thought the best plays came from overseas – until Roger Hall broke the mould. Mason mentions him, and others, with respect.

Fun point to note: Mason recounts his post-show encounter, in Hokitika, with a young man from the bush who has bought his recordings of The End of the Golden Weather and learned it all by heart. The VUP publication of that play, revised and reset in 1970, is dedicated “To B.C. Dear stalker, friend”.

Not Christmas, but Guy Fawkes is a precious gift that enriches our understanding of what it was to be a pioneering playwright in New Zealand.

As with The End of the Golden Weather, accolades are due to Production Designers Jane Hakaraia and Sean, Sound Designer and Composer Paul McLaney’s and Technical Operator Niamh-Campbell Ward.

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Background note:

Along with his early ventures as a playwright, Bruce Mason sought to discover himself and exercise his writing muscles with a number of semi-autobiographical prose pieces. Only when he was commissioned to present a solo show at the South Pacific Festival of the Arts in 1976 did he bring four of them together, under the collective title Not Christmas, but Guy Fawkes. Three self-reflective prose pieces were published in Landfall in 1955, ’58 and ’66, and another was broadcast twice in 1973.

Following the premiere of Not Christmas, but Guy Fawkes, at the Rotorua Town Hall’s Concert Chamber in March 1976, he took it to the Christchurch Festival of the Arts and subsequently presented it at Palmerston North’s Centrepoint Theatre, Wanganui’s Four Seasons, Wellington’s Downstage (twice), Auckland’s Maidment, Hamilton’s Playbox, Tauranga’s Gateway, Dunedin’s Fortune and Nelson’s Garrick Theatre. He also toured extensively with his other solo shows: The End of the Golden Weather, To Russia with Love, and Courting Blackbird.

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