I recall, from age five, my lovely old Mum would often describe the vagaries of her world (and mine) as part of ‘life’s rich tapestry’.

At 5am this morning, after much cogitation and in considerable arthritic pain, I rose, confronted my laptop, and remembered Mum’s words.

Raised by Anglican nuns in an orphanage on Bank’s Peninsula, she was ‘full of wise saws and modern instances’ with ‘wise saws and modern instances’ being one of them. She could seldom tell me the source of her sayings and would always defer to an old autograph book she’d kept from childhood in which friends had written ‘sage advice for a good life’, verses such as Charles Bowen’s ‘the rain it raineth on the just and also on the unjust fella; but chiefly on the just, because the unjust hath the just’s umbrella’ with these bons mots often supported by tiny, delicate, watercolour illustrations.

With no internet in those halcyon days, I had to wait years to find the source of these ‘wise saws and modern instances’ including aforesaid, which is, as we all know, lifted from Jaques ‘All the world’s a stage’ monologue in Act 2 Scene 7 of Shakespeare’s As You Like It’ where he describes an Elizabethan Justice (of the Peace) in deliciously sardonic, capon-loving, Gerry Brownlee-like terms.

So how does this all fit with a review of Faith Ward’s classy new play Pretty Legal staged in the Coal Bunker Studio of the Pumphouse Theatre as part of Auckland Pride 2025? It does because, as my old Mum used to allude, it’s part of the rich tapestry of queer life in Aotearoa especially as it relates to those frequent occasions when, driven by ignorance, stigma, and discrimination, it bumps up against (read crashes into) the police, the church, the judiciary, parliament, jurisprudence, and the law.

A quick flick through our rainbow history will tell you that this has happened regularly throughout our 185-year history – we’ve been outlawed, ostracised, victimised, criminalised, bashed, banished, and gaoled all for being who we are and loving who we love. Until 1866 we faced the death penalty for sodomy, in 1941 the Crimes Amendment Act removed flogging but retained life imprisonment, in 1961 The Crimes Act included lesbianism in New Zealand law for the first time, criminalising sexual relations between women over twenty-one and girls under sixteen.

In 1973, not 2019 as we are encouraged to believe, the first Gay Pride March in New Zealand took place.

We began to become unshackled by the passing of Homosexual Law Reform (1986), the Civil Unions Act (2004), Marriage Equality (2013), the Criminal Records (Expungement of Convictions for Historical Homosexual Offences) Act (2018), the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Act (2022), and the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act that allowed for self-identification passed in 2023.

It would seem, however, that the first recorded use of the term ‘life’s rich tapestry’ was made in 1936 in an Arthur Marshall piece entitled ‘Showing the School/The Games Mistress’. Marshall, host of the BBC’s ‘Call My Bluff’, was obsessed with using schoolgirls and their teachers as comic material and was, early in his career, noted for playing women’s roles in university plays.

So, there you are: with the help of today’s fascinating rabbit holes, we arrive at Faith Ward’s Pretty Legal, described in the publicity material as ‘amidst the passing of the marriage equality bill, law firm colleagues Olivia and Katrina finally leave their marriages-of-convenience for each other. Although Katrina can’t quite tear herself away from her ex-husband who also happens to be engaged to Olivia’s ex-husband. All is well, now that it’s “pretty legal” …or is it? Bittersweet, heartfelt, and acerbically clever, Pretty Legal is a daring new play that hits close to home and celebrates the resilience of human connections.’

Yes, it’s all that, and some.

The show comes with the warning that there are adult themes (there are), strong language (yes, but no worse than you’ll see on TV at 6pm), alcohol and drug use (which is pretty confronting), and mentions of death and illness (HIV and AIDS).

Writer/director Faith Ward has put together an excellent night out with considerable thanks to her clever casting.

This was my first experience of the Coal Bunker Studio, a smallish (80 seat), multipurpose venue. It’s a useful addition to the Pumphouse Theatre, accessible, and especially useful for smaller shows and workshopping. It has limited tech capacity which, for Pretty Legal, was most effectively handled given its ‘lights up lights down’ limitations, and the acoustics are fairly unforgiving, but the size of the venue does compensate for that.

The full house was pleasing to see, and I have no doubt audience members would have considered the experience to be money well spent. As always, I sat close to the front (hearing issues) and had the joy of meeting a long time Facebook friend who I had previously only known online. An attractive, cultured woman, we had plenty to catch up on preshow and during the interval. As we get older and our worlds shrink, the theatre becomes almost as important as a place to socialise with compatriots as it is to engage with enriching performing arts experiences.

Playwright Ward says in her useful programme notes that she’s moved out of her comfort zone in creating this work and I’ve no doubt she’s taken a few of her audience members with her. This is a good thing. Marriages do implode, wives do fall in love with new female partners, and husbands jump the fence and hook up with new men. It happens. It aways has. The human detritus left by this is frequently unpredictable, especially when there are children involved, and Ward explores this both sensitively and with a range of appropriate blunt instruments. The result is a challenging journey medicated with humour, humanity, sex, drugs, and (suitably mellow) rock ‘n’ roll. It’s subtle, accurately observed, well performed, and is a satisfying watch.

There are serious crisis moments – HIV ain’t to be sniffed at – and the challenges faced by new same sex couples are well canvassed. Even though the chaps talk briefly about stereotyping, Ward stays well away from that yawn-making trough, and has written a crisp, economical script anchored in true human reality with real characters in recognisable situations, albeit in somewhat less usual circumstances than most.

The production – tightly directed, also by Ward – is made up of a series of short episodes, vignettes almost, which initially, hold up the action as the actors come to terms with limited exits and entrances and the audience works at following the unfamiliar narrative. This ceases to be a concern as we catch up with the style and form of the piece and find ourselves increasingly at ease with being in the front seat of a car one moment, watching a rugby match at another, in a chapel, at the kitchen table, and back in the car, as the narrative and the performances kick in and the pace of events takes over.

Katrina (Karen Codd) and Barry Hoffman (Rupert Green) are excellent as one heterosexual couple whose spark is gone. Both manage the magic of the breakup with real aplomb, and the connection with the new partner with absolute credibility. There are so many spaces for the actors to live in, so much nuance, so many variations, and the choices they make are uniformly excellent.

Likewise, Olivia Campbell (Rebecca Wright) and Simon Blair (Liam Prisk) are equally good. There’s real sensitivity in the hues of these performances, and each shows real empathy for the other as they stay connected yet move separately into their brave new lives. Again, credible as a straight couple who are, to some extent, finding it difficult to let go of the comforts of cohabitation.

Green’s journey is the most profound and he travels it with courage, from the happiness of his upcoming marriage to his AIDS diagnosis and beyond. A fine performance, not overplayed, and he cleverly lets us do the emotional heavy lifting. This is as good as it gets in a work like this.

Liam Prisk is also excellent. He plays Simon with real empathy, and I end up caring about him a lot. While Green does the lead up work, it’s left to Prisk to play out the ‘til death do us part bit’ and his performance is heartbreaking.

Rebecca Wright plays Olivia as the true legal professional workaholic and her journey is much less prescribed. Her emotional arc is challenging but she manages it with seeming ease. She’s Mum to two youngsters, Lucy (Jay Kearney) and Matthew (Ben McIntosh) whose sole purpose seems to be to wind their mother up which gives Wright some great options and she grabs them all. The kids are great, modern and irritating, but when the denouement comes, they’re right there for their parents. Ward could have gone anywhere with the intergenerational relationships, but she sticks to her knitting and the result serves the play beautifully.

Karen Codd’s Katrina is the enigma in the play. So much of who is she remains obscure and oblique and Codd’s is a performance of exceptional subtlety. She verbally tests her new relationship in ways that leave us questioning her commitment when, in fact, it’s never in doubt despite her tart but superficial ‘button pushing’ behaviour. She is, after all, the wife whose ex is dying of AIDS, and all the questions that this pose, ensures our discussion of the work continues as we wait for our takeaway Thai and even beyond.

I’m always drawn to the subtle touches that provide evidence of a high degree of care and thought having gone into creating the work, touches that provide evidence of a better than rich back story. In Pretty Legal the work is riddled with them, anchor points that enable the space between performers and audience to taste like the most beautiful baklava. A couple will do: the tense, jealous questioning of a play attended which is thrown away as being O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night which feels like a metaphor for everything Ward’s play addresses, and the unexpected gift in book form of Mourning Becomes Electra, O’Neill again, whose three plays are based on Aeschylus great Oresteia trilogy, a further metaphor that can’t be ignored. Having these references to things external makes such a difference for those who notice them.

It was an excellent evening at the theatre, a deceptively simple story, splendidly written, well directed and subtly acted, yet so much more than this. Much to take away, much to reflect on. I couldn’t help but think that stylistically this is a play that’s aching to be filmed. It has TV script written all over it.

Underneath it all there is the marriage equality question posed earlier by Ward in her promotional material: “All is well, now that it’s ‘pretty legal’ … or is it?”

Did the sky fall in as we were told it would? Was the fabric of society rent asunder? Were we bombarded with frogs and locusts, and did boils abound as Apostle Brian promised? No. All that happened was a few same sex couples got hitched and have experienced both the joy and the angst that all married couples have experienced since time immemorial.

I remember the day Louisa Wall’s Marriage Equality Bill was passed in the Whare Pāremata. It was my birthday, and we’d hired a restaurant for the celebration. Plenty of wonderful friends turned up. Did we sing and dance and be merry? Like hell we did. We watched parliament TV, cheered when the numbers came up, had lots of hugs, and then everyone went home. A memorable birthday, but not for any of the reasons anticipated.

Oh well, Faith Ward remembers it too, and has written an excellent play about it.

A splendid and unexpected bonus in anyone’s book and certainly a worthy thread in life’s rich tapestry.

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