The New Court Theatre

After its 14-year post-earthquake sojourn at ‘The Shed’ in Addington, Christchurch’s Court Theatre is back in town at last – but not at the old stone Arts Centre. Move on past Te Puna o Waiwhetū, the art gallery, cross the Avon, continue past Te Pae, the conference centre, to 129 Gloucester Street. Facing Tūranga, the library, and not far from Cathedral Square, the brand new building’s street front announces itself as fresh and inviting. Inside, its locally-sourced timbers welcome us into at bright and warming foyer space.

Along with Wellington’s Hannah Playhouse and Auckland’s Waterfront Theatre, this gorgeous new venue completes a trifecta of purpose-built theatres dedicated to housing professional theatre – and it’s the only one housing all its admin, design and construction functions. Large windows at every level offer natural light for daytime activities and the Workshop at street level allows the option of letting passers by observe the creation of new sets and props.

I’m told the 2nd floor rehearsal rooms have the same acoustic as the theatre spaces, to overcome the problem of actors having to re-pitch the voices they’ve been using in the weeks before production week. The Green Room is on that floor too, while the Dressing Rooms are on the 1^st floor – raising the question of whether it’s there to serve shows in production or in rehearsal. I am not privy to how the stage levels are accessed or how the backstage areas work.

The importance and value of philanthropic funding for the company’s ‘forever home’, the realisation of a 54-year dream, is exemplified in the naming rights: the Gough Family Foyer, the Stewart Family Theatre, the Wakefield Family Front Room, the Rātā Foundation Studio, Ravenscar Lounge, the Foundation Room. Plus there is the Friends Lounge for pre-show events with private access to the Stewart Family Theatre. See further Event Space information here.

The three-tier auditorium for the Stewart Family Theatre, with burgundy seating (capacity up to 381 with 40-odd marked ‘R’ for restricted view) wraps around three sides at the lower and upper balcony levels, with a few stalls seats flanking the slightly thrust stage. My seat for the opening night is under the lower balcony overhang, high from the floor with a metal footrest tucked under (not good for short people) and right on the edge of ‘R’ zone: I can only see the dangling legs of a key character, on a raised level stage left in the final scene. The acoustics, however, are perfect!

When the late-lamented Downstage Theatre moved from its temporary Star Boating Company venue into its purpose-built Hannah Playhouse, Artistic Director Sunny Amey wanted to open it with Much Ado About Nothing but the Board thought the title unfortunate in light of the excitement about the building. Sunny opted, instead, for As You Like It. Fortunately no such title qualms have attended the choice of The End of the Golden Weather for the show that marks The Beginning of the Court’s New Era.

The Play and Production

All of Bruce Mason’s plays, from The Bonds of Love (1953) to Blood of the Lamb (1980), include a critical enquiry into what it is to be a man in New Zealand. Frustrated at the failure of the New Zealand Players to fully produce The Pohutukawa Tree, he wrote The End of the Golden Weather – a voyage into a New Zealand childhood as a solo work, in order to ensure it would get produced and performed, by him.

It is a semi-autobiographical loss of innocence/ rite of passage/ coming of age story recalled, verbally and physically, by a mature man about himself a boy on the cusp of puberty. Amid a miscellany of archetypal characters, the main focus falls on the Boy’s relationship with a neuro-diverse fantasist who calls himself Firpo, after a world-renowned boxer, and is fixated on becoming a world-renowned athlete. But first, a brief anecdote:

Mason dedicated the Second Edition of The End of the Golden Weather (VUP, 1970) “To D.C. Deer stalker, friend”. His 21-page introductory ‘Note’, written in script form as an interview with himself as Author, includes a recollection of performing his touring solo play in the Provincial Chambers, in Christchurch, attended by a party of Christ’s College boys. “About five minutes before the end, at the point were Firpo collapses there was a prolonged shout from the audience. I stopped, waited, apologised to the audience and took it back a paragraph or two; got to the end without incident.”

Subsequently Bruce is visited backstage by a roughly-dressed Young Man who had arrived very late, “three sheets in the wind.” Instead of apologising for the interruption, the conflicted man invites Bruce back to his “room in a pub … Got some beer in”, and there reveals what had brought him over from Hokitika. He is a deer stalker. Killing is all he knows. “Things that live, have a right to live, I kill.” One night, sobering up at a mate’s place, he happened to hear recordings of The End of the Golden Weather Part 1 and The Made Man. He bought the records for himself, then the book (Price Milburn, 1962) – and memorised it: “Every bloody word. Learned it on the tops; said it over and over, around a fire, till I had it off.” And he proved it by getting Bruce to start a sentence, any sentence from the script, then finished it for him.

We can only wonder, 60-odd years later, how that must have sounded: Bruce Mason’s crisply articulated consonants and roundly modulated vowels countered by Barry Crump’s guttural Kiwi bloke drawl – both, however, richly resonant.

Why am I recalling this? Because it strikes me that Sir Ian Mune’s voice, as the Narrator in The Court Theatre’s production of Raymond Hawthorne’s company version of The End of the Golden Weather, may be described as a potent blend of both. Older, of course … Mason would be 104 now, so if we want to filter those semi-autobiographical experiences through a contemporary lens, Mune’s seniority in the role is entirely appropriate. The dehumanising politics inherent in ‘The Night of the Riots’ and ignorant attitudes to Firpo’s neuro-diversity, for example, remain painfully relevant. This is not ‘museum theatre’; it’s timeless and universal themes make it a classic.

I should note it was assumed Sir Ian, aged 83, would read the narration in performance but he has admirably chosen to memorise it while holding a small sheet of crib notes. His relationship with the work goes back to seeing Mason perform it in Tauranga, then decades later collaborating on the screenplay adaptation, completed just before Mason’s untimely death from cancer on the last day of 1982, aged 61. The Mune-directed film opened to great acclaim in 1991. His performance resonates with profound credibility as recollections of a lived experience.  

The setting for the play is a beach called Te Parenga, looking out to Rangitoto: Mason’s fictionalised version of Takapuna (a North Shore suburb of Auckland), where his family spent summers in the 1930s. Mark McEntyre’s washed-wooden set suggests a beach featuring a sloping jetty until we notice an old armchair sinking into the sand, a discarded bedstead and an upright piano. It therefore allows the action to flow from the beach to the family home, into a church, into the village and up a staircase that leads to a somewhat forbidden property. Martyn Roberts’ lighting design subtly delineates the spaces and times of day, with starlight evoked by dropped-in golden lights.

Director Lara Macgregor manifests the action with a seamless fluency that belies its complexity, both as a multi-facetted ‘slices-of-life’ miscellany and as a production involving 40-odd characters with a cast of 10 that was written for 12. Actually, with the Narrator and Boy being the exclusive roles of two actors, the other 8 ensemble actors play 38 roles, each fully clad in costumes, designed by Deborah Moor, that lightly evoke a between-the-wars summer (unaware another is looming). Some quick-changes are wondrous to behold.

Initially, the Boy, sensitively realised by James Kupa, is a relative observer of life and those living it during a ‘Sunday at Te Parenga’, where the beach is variously populated by the likes of sermon-rehearsing Reverend Thirle (Kathleen Burns); Miss Effie Brett (Sela Faletolu-Fasi) prancing like a gigantic ballerina, and her ‘gaoler’ sister Miss Sybil Brett (Reylene Rose Hilaga) who drinks!; Firpo (Gregory Cooper) who digs for pipis and whose training as an athlete makes him ‘the butt of the beach; Canadian wrestler Jesse Cabot (Nick Tipa) who jogs while holding a huge rock in each hand; and Sergeant ‘Robbie’ Robinson (Mark Hadlow) with his deeply Victorian sense of propriety.

At home his Mother (Anna McPhail), Father (Mark Hadlow) host charades with Guests, where the Boy, his younger brother (Kathleen Burns) and little sister (Alison Walls) perform a few curtain raisers – before prevailing on their conservative Father to top the night with his Chaplinesque doctor-cum-surgeon routine. To be picky, he calls for his tenon saw and gets a crosscut saw (why?) – but the idea of innocent fun with family and friends sets us up for the flipside:

‘The night of the riots’, secretly observed by the Boy, opens his eyes to the deprivations of the Depression for once-working, now unemployed, men and their under-fed families. The spectre of Robbie “just following orders” of an authoritarian government and demoralising the men, who’d thought of him as a mate, even more is devastating for the Boy. He has witnessed the humour and kindness he had seen and loved in the old policeman so easily and willingly extinguished! “That night marked an end: the end of the golden weather.”

Written to provoke the audience’s imaginations simply through words, this production evokes ‘The night of the riots’ with dark figures in silhouette, allowing fewer words to capture the experience. Indeed, Raymond Hawthorn has judiciously pruned the whole script-for-solo-performance to allow the visual language of design and performance to ‘speak’ in harmony with Mason’s eloquence.

‘Christmas at Te Parenga’ returns the Boy and his siblings to the mixed emotions of childhood: shooed away from sneaking tastes of Mother’s baking only to see Father, fancy free from the working year, helping himself and getting frisky with Mother; the Boy and Brother enduring guilt-inducing experience of Christmas Eve (the sermon as a voice-over so Kathryn can be on stage as the Brother); excitement, disappointment and ambivalence at the gender-specific gifts extracted from pillowslips – at 5am; sent off to the beach where the eccentrics parade and greet; quarrels and tears; the midday feast; the Boy’s attempts to ensure his Brother knows his two-word line for the play that will feature in the evening concert …

(Ammended for accuracy)
As the Sister, Alison appears to play the piano exquisitely (her hands at the keyboard embedded in the piano casing are very convincing) and is delightful with her petal-throwing, retrieving and throwing again to the Boy/James’ rendition of Mendelsonn’s ‘Spring Song’. Mason satirises himself as a budding playwright with the Boy’s earnest drama, By Love Deliver’d, which his brother ruins by failing to enter let alone deliver his line.

The reconciliation on the jetty, where fury morphs into empathy, is heart-warming: an ideal note on which to end the first half.

The timeline for ‘The Made Man’ over-arches the Summer scenes, beginning before school breaks up, when the Boy first encounters Firpo – at the top of the green staircase that leads to the ‘out of bounds’ property of the “old and stinking rich” Atkinsons (forebears, presumably, of the Atkinsons who own the Te Parenga citrus orchard in The Pohutukawa Tree). James Kupa and Gregory Cooper embody the evolving and dissolving relationship between the Boy and Firpo exquisitely, honouring the much deeper insights into the human condition Mason brings to this further exploration of the Boy’s loss of innocence/ rite of passage/ coming of age.

The Boy’s initial childlike fantasising, relating the staircase to Jack’s beanstalk with fearsome giants at the top, is met with friendly Firpo’s ‘other world’ nature and aligns with his mission to stop people laughing at him by becoming a champion athlete. It’s Mrs Atkinson who brings them down to earth – or tries to. Anna McPhail captures precisely her well-meaning but patronising way of dealing with the nephew she’s obliged to take care of. The fury that explodes from Firpo when Mrs Atkinson then the Boy calls him Tim, sows the seed of incompatibility that will lead to his downfall, leaving the ‘giants’ to live on in privileged complacency and the boy to confront the complexities of adolescence and looming adulthood.

Meanwhile, when deaf Mr Atkinson (Mark Hadlow) arrives, the old couple resort to shouting and caricature, which strips them of the upper-class subtleties inherent in Mason’s writing. The Boy is sworn to secrecy and banned from further visits, so the relationship is nipped in the bud – until Firpo-in-training appears on the beach.

Nick Tipa captures ‘nicely’ the duplicitous way ultra-matey Uncle Jim showers Firpo with compliments, by way of entertaining the crowd, who happily play along with the ‘fun’. When the Boy is asked by sporty beach boys Jo Dyer (Alison Walls) and Bob Ferguson (Reylene Rose Hilaga) to deliver an envelope to Firpo, he has no idea it’s a trap. When they discover it’s a challenge to compete in a friendly race on the beach, Firpo is buoyed by this opportunity to live up to his adopted name and waxes lyrical about becoming “A made man!” – infusing the Boy with the concept too.

He becomes fixated on helping Firpo to realise his dream – not least to feed his own dream of being personally acknowledged from an Olympic podium. He is undeterred by the railing of his British teacher, Mr Stephen Irons against the colonial cult of brawn over brain. Intriguingly Mason, Macgregor and Kathleen Burns give him the sendup treatment despite his alignment with the playwright’s own values. Having consulted with his father, the Boy spends all his pocket money on meat for Firpo only to find he’s vegetarian. His vain attempt to pray to God for help is thwarted by the choir at practice.

“God’s deaf, and Firpo’s on his own. I feel tense and full of dread.”

Race day finds the beach humming with anticipation – but where is Firpo? The Boy hopes he’s forgotten but he turns up, and his warm-up antics produce titters and laughter. The ever-gruff Sergeant Robinson has an inkling what they’re up to and, wielding his starting pistol, insists the race is properly run. For a moment we are allowed to believe Firpo – memorably frozen in a leaping posture while the others come back from a false start – will win until (spoiler alert), in a well-staged slo-mo sequence, he doesn’t. He sprawls on the sand “like a gawky albatross” as Jo Dyer wins and bets are honoured.

Only the Boy attends to the defeated Firpo, who declares he’s “done” and asks his only friend for help. In a remarkable moment of insight, Mason tells us that as Firpo leans on him, the Boy feels “a sudden sharp warmth. I’ve never been so happy in my life.” But further attempts to help and reassure Firpo back in his hut are rejected – and when the Boy mentions his appeal to God, Firpo’s terrifying anger drives him away. Comfort – and a sense of redemption for his sin of pride – is found in the embrace of his empathetic parents and siblings.  

As Summer begins to fade towards Autumn, an impulse sends the Boy back up the green staircase, only to be told by the workman (Nick Tipa) demolishing his hut that Tim Barlow – aka Firpo – got go so verbally and physically violent with the Atkinsons, they had him carted off “to the nuthouse” in a straitjacket. “Look son,” he rationalises, “you gotta lock them up. Otherwise we’d all go loopy.”

That’s when a jaundiced bloom flutters from a broom bush. “I pick it up and somehow I know, as I finger the jaded petals, that summer is quite at an end.”

The voyage has taken us through emotional highs and lows, evoking our own memories and amusing us with its nostalgia until we realise that human nature has not really changed and history is trying to repeat itself.

In summary, The Court Theatre’s amusing and moving production of a company version of The End of the Golden Weather is an inspired choice for the opening of their splendid new theatre.

Further reading:
The Plays of Bruce Mason – a survey (Playmarket/VUP, 2015)

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