I thought I knew Bruce Mason’s The End of the Golden Weather intimately (see below) but Stephen Lovatt refreshes it lovingly in a richly textured yet subtly nuanced performance. Revealing treasures like a relaxed yet fully focused beachcomber on an exceptionally bountiful day, he draws all our attention to the story. And he makes it look so easy, one could be forgiven for taking his skill for granted.

Director Shane Bosher has gathered an ideal team of creatives to augment Lovatt’s artistry. Production Designers Jane Hakaraia and Sean Lynch have created a rumpled sandscape backdrop with a lighting design that captures multiple moods, and Paul McLaney’s Sound Design and Composition punctuates the action to great effect – all operated with sensitive precision by Niamh-Campbell Ward.

Whoever is responsible for distilling Mason’s original text to 85 minutes (when he used to perform it in two separate parts) must be congratulated. Nothing is lost; all is clear; less is more. There are details I hear as if for the first time. For example, I’ve said in the past that despite being set in the same location as The Pohutukawa Tree – Te Parenga; the fictionalised Takapuna of Mason’s childhood – The End of the Golden Weather makes no mention of Māori. Yet there it is in the prologue’s evocation of the colonising settlers: “[They] stepped ashore to slash the bush, banish the natives and pray silently into the night.”

As he recollects the pre-adolescent experiences that mark the transition from sheltered innocence towards adulthood, Lovatt is perfectly poised between being the (nameless) Boy and the self-aware Man, bringing both perspectives to each phase of his story while slipping effortlessly in and out of the diverse characters he encounters.

It’s the 1930s, between the ‘World Wars’ in a middle-class coastal settlement on the outskirts of Auckland.

‘Sunday at Te Parenga’ introduces us to the stone-kicking Reverend Thirle, thin-as-a-spoon would-be athlete Firpo (of whom much more later), rock-bearing wrestler Jesse Cabot, gnarled-as-a-nut police Sergeant Robinson, shocked at the sight of men in shorts, overheard snippets of passing gossip as the Boy’s family enjoys tea on the glassed-in verandah facing Rangitoto … With guests, as always, the night builds up to his father’s celebrated turn as a Chaplinesque doctor performing radical surgery on a patient suffering from Convolvulus, peppered with quotes from the Bible and Hamlet. All innocent fun.

The scene that gives the play its name is ‘The Night of the Riots’, where the Boy sneaks out to observe a confrontation between unemployed men and Sgt Robinson on horseback. (It may be seen as an echo of, or precursor to, the infamous Queen Street Riot in March 1932, at the height of The Depression.) The degradation of men unable to feed their families is shattering for the Boy, confronted by the realities of an adult world. And it resonates, even now:

“Man’s Own country, studded with grim effigies marked Greed, Authority, Pride and Law – armour to be assumed for adult occasions. And humour: kindness: sacred and redeeming graces as I had seen them and loved them in the old policeman – how easily, how willingly extinguished! That night marked an end: the end of the golden weather.”

‘Christmas at Te Parenga’ brings us back to the beach and the boy’s family. The nativity story at church blends with pillowslips that miraculously conceive and bear gifts. The loving Christmas spirit spreads to the characters on the beach and in the water until the pressure of having to be happy all day becomes a trial. After the feast, focus turns to the Boy and his talented sister and reluctant brother, in anticipation of the evening’s concert. With so much invested in his creation, the way the Boy’s brother sabotages it, and gets all the laughs, is as devastating as their later reconciliation is heartwarming. This is one of two especially insightful moments that, in particular, earn my great respect for Mason’s humanity.

‘The Made Man’ is a discrete trio of sequences that interrogates the Kiwi cult of ‘brawn over brain’ by tracing the Boy’s entire relationship with Firpo – a fantasist fixated on competing at the next Olympic Games.

Exploring to the top of a long green staircase up the cliff, the boy meets Firpo for the first time. It emerges that this is Tim Barlow, nephew of the privileged Mrs Atkinson who lives in a palatial home with her grumpy old husband while cosigning their inconvenient dependent to a ramshackle bach. Their friendship nearly stops before it starts when the Boy calls him Mr Barlow. The Boy’s father recalls Firpo was a famous South American boxer. It’s when Te Parenga’s Firpo turns up ‘in training’ on the beach that the blokey interactions start, abetted by Uncle Jim, ‘all in good fun’.

Despite warnings from his parents to be wary of Firpo, when local lads Joe Dyer and Bob Fergusson ask the Boy to deliver a letter to Firpo, he does. On realising it’s an invitation to a ‘friendly’ challenge race, the Boy becomes fixated on getting Firpo fit and strong. Ironically it is the disliked Mr Irons, an exchange teacher from London, who derides the Boy’s ‘Made Man’ drawing and the “cult of brawn over brains”. Casual advice from Father, while shaving – delightfully played – sends the Boy to the Butcher for red meat, unaware Firpo is a vegetarian. A last-ditch attempt to secure divine intervention at church is thwarted by the Rev Thirle’s choir practice, leaving the Boy full of dread.

And so to race day, where the impossible dream Firpo has infused the Boy with also has us in its thrall. The high drama conjured by Lovatt to its climactic and inevitable outcome (the Greek poets called it catastrophe) draws us deeper into the emotional turmoil shared by the Boy and Firpo. It’s when the Boy helps Firpo to put his pants on over his togs that Mason’s next astonishing insight surfaces: “He clambers into them awkwardly, leaning on me. I feel a sudden sharp warmth. I’ve never been so happy in my life.” Is this hubris, to feel joy because someone is wholly dependent on you? Be that as it may, it is short-lived, thanks to the Boy mentioning God.

The epilogue, involving a demolition workman, reveals the subsequent fate of Firpo and leaves the Boy, and us, to contemplate the realities of what we like to call ‘civilised society’. To quote from my book, The Plays of Bruce Mason – a survey (Playmarket, VUP, 2015): “Because The End of the Golden Weather has always profiled a bygone era, including for its first audiences, every generation is provoked to compare who we were then who we are now, and to ask themselves how far we have come.”

In every sense a classic, The End of the Golden Weather makes the personal political and this production does it proud. Not to be missed!

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A brief history of The End of the Golden Weather

Bruce Mason wrote The End of the Golden Weather in desperation, aware his larger cast plays were destined to be produced by amateur companies and would never afford him an income. He first performed it at the New Zealand Players Theatre Workshop in August 1959.

As a teenager in the 1960s, I saw Mason perform it in two parts over two nights in the Khandallah Town Hall. Mesmerising. He performed it nearly 1,000 times throughout New Zealand (he died on the last day of 1982). Since then, it has been kept alive in a recording he made, a multi-cast adaptation by Raymond Hawthorn which was produced by Theatre Corporate in 1981 (directed by Paul Minnifie), an ensemble cast version directed by Murray Lynch for Auckland’s Tantrum theatre (1987) and revived at Downstage (1990), and a feature film written and directed by Ian Mune (1991).

To mark the millennium, Peter Vere-Jones reclaimed the solo version at Te Papa in 2000, directed by Susan Wilson. Stephen Lovatt claimed it in 2006 (directed by Mark Clare, produced by Graeme Bennett) and took it on a North Island tour in 2007 – and for the next ten years performed the Christmas at Te Parenga scene on Christmas Day at Takapuna Beach (produced by Roger Hall, free with donations to Oxfam). Meanwhile the Murray Lynch ensemble version was produced by the Auckland Theatre Company in 2011, Matt Wilson went solo in Dunedin in 2020 (directed by Lisa Warrington) and the Hawthorn company version opened the new Court Theatre in 2024 (directed by Alison Walls, with Ian Mune as the Narrator).

As production entity Brilliant Adventures, Stephen Lovatt and director Shane Bosher brought the double shot of Mason solos, The End of the Golden Weather and Not Christmas but Guy Fawkes to Circa in August 2021, and had got as far as dress rehearsals when Covid pulled the plug. They did get The End of the Golden Weather to The Hawkes Bay Arts Festival in October 2021 however, but the rest of the planned tour was cancelled. And now, at last, it has opened at Circa in repertoire with Not Christmas But Guy Fawkes, as part of an Every Kind of Weather package.

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