“Once upon a Time” is the key phrase in the title of this third play of Tza Drake’s crime trilogy which has the overall title of Restaurant with No-Name Trilogy. There is a ‘The Story So Far’ in the programme which seems long and complicated but is not necessary at all if you want to follow Once Upon a Time in Wellington, which has an air of unreality about it. 

This final play is a crime story full of clichés. Two seemingly incompetent criminals, recently out of prison for murder, have hit on hard times and they plan the inevitable full-proof plan of an abduction of a young wife and a ransom to raise much needed cash from the wife’s husband, Chef, who is, according to the trilogy’s synopsis, “a very, very bad man.”

One of the criminals deals with Chef, the other with his wife. They talk a great deal but a stalemate is the result. Chef won’t cough up any cash and his wife knows he’s a very, very bad man and has no feelings for anyone particularly for her. The two criminals occasionally meet up and talk. 

I have to admit I am completely ignorant of how New Zealand criminals talk but the pair in Once Upon a Time in Wellington sound and behave much more like a couple of shifty Englishmen with their dart playing and one of them supporting Arsenal. In fact there is nothing to suggest the play’s setting, apart from the title, is New Zealand. 

The play does have one scene which I have never encountered before. In the middle of arguing with the woman the criminal suddenly feels the need to empty his bladder in the toilet. It is never clear if this is either a touch of comedy or bold realism. However, it is certainly a novel addition to the genre.

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I wish I could say that after three goes and having graduated from The International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) with a Masters in Scriptwriting, Tza Drake has indeed mastered the mysteries of play writing. But I can’t because he hasn’t – or not by the evidence of this third play in his ‘Restaurant with No-Name Trilogy’ anyway.

His first play, Once Upon a Time in Aro Valley (2009), fell far short of its claim to be “Scarfies meets late night Tarantino”. Last year’s My Kitchen Kills (directed by Paul McLaughlin) showed more promise but was nevertheless undercooked.

While the programme reveals he wrote Once Upon a Time in Wellington before being accepted into the IIML, we might have expected he’d revise it before producing and directing it, having hopefully learned a thing or two. But apparently not. The problems are basic. 

With no apparent motivation, apart from being unemployed and bitter, two guys conspire to abduct a young woman then show her texted photo to her husband in order to extort a ransom. But he, too, is a soulless sociopath.

She – the abducted wife – claims to be empathetic and I can’t say she’s not but nothing in the actions she’s given shows it. Had she got her captor talking about why he was doing this and revealing his vulnerability in the process, both characters may have become humanised. We might even have empathised with their growing mutual empathy, but the script takes us nowhere near such territory.

At the husband’s apartment, the extorter and hopefully caring husband – who quickly reveals he doesn’t – hang out while waiting for the banks to open (since ATMs have limits). It’s a stand-off strangely lacking in tension, downward pressure or jeopardy: all essential ingredients for drama (and comedy, come to that).  

The would-be extorters are Gene (Frano Biggs) and Dennis (Kenneth Gaffney). They played ‘Chef’ and his protégé Sam respectively in My Kitchen Kills, where Sam and a maître d called Stef ended up imprisoned for fraud and perverting the course of justice while ‘Chef’, who murdered Barry the bastard restaurant owner, got off scot free, took over the debt-free business and married Kirsty the waitress.

In Once Upon a Time in Aro Valley, Biggs and Gaffney did not play Gene and Dennis who ended up imprisoned for the murder (and dismemberment) of Dennis’s abusive girlfriend. But now Biggs and Gaffney do play Gene and Dennis in Once Upon a Time in Wellington, now out of prison but unemployed.

Their ‘victims’, however, are never named out loud (a basic craft requirement, easily overlooked when the written script is littered with character names) and the programme only lists the actors’ names.

Scrutiny of ‘The Story So Far’, in the programme, suggests, in retrospect, that Stef Anderson – who played Gene in Once Upon a Time in Aro Valley and the Cop in My Kitchen Kills – is now playing ‘Chef’ which means his wife, played by Felicity Milovanovich, is Kirsty. Knowing that may help although requiring your audience to swot up on the backstory beforehand is a cheek (and a cheat) and anyone recognising the actors from the previous plays in the trilogy will only be confused as to who they are now and why they are doing as they do.  

All four actors do their best to invest their characters with, well, characteristics, and I suppose they’ve worked out their motivations based on their backstories but the play’s failure to share that dimension within what is served up leaves its audience on the outside with their noses pressed up against the proverbial restaurant window.

With both pairings – Gene and Kirsty (?); Dennis and ‘Chef’ (?) – stuck in waiting mode, there is plenty of opportunity to unpack the ingredients and reveal what brought this dish to the table, not as exposition but driven by strong wants, needs and feelings. But here we hit the major problem: all three men are unfeeling sociopaths and when they don’t give a shit, why should we?

There are some slick bits of dialogue but they sound like the playwright trying to imitate examples of the genre rather than these particular characters expressing themselves. They get things to do – take a piss, eat a snack, drink beers, play darts – but none of these actions serve to expose anything that might make us care.  

Down on their luck, incompetent crims are a well-established component of the crime genre and well-crafted scripts make us empathise with them against our better judgement (e.g. Dog Day Afternoon). But there have to be moments where we see ourselves reflected in them and are confronted with moral dilemmas that compel us to ask, “What would I do?”

As it stands there is no way into the story for the audience let alone anything to sustain us, intellectually or emotionally. All Drake has done is objectified some superficial elements of the genre.

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