Be warned, if you want a rollicking, jolly night out at the theatre then this might not be for you. There is nudity, strong language and raw subject matter. But if you want a deeply satisfying theatrical experience then go see this play.

Playwright Jo Randerson paints a New Zealand family dystopia, dark secrets and dysfunction laid bare. An air of menace pervades the stage and never leaves. In this production, 14 years since its commission, everything is pared back – a skeletal set, few props, the laconic kiwi voice ringing through a stripped back script and most impressively, finely tempered acting. Everything sings in unison here.

Heather O’Carroll with locked jaw stalks across the stage as Juliet – a hard woman barely containing her pain. Her dim younger lover Ian is played by an enchanting Richard Chapman who imbues the role with pouty-lipped innocence. Scott Wills as Leon relishes his role as a psychological bully and finally the catalyst for action – the ‘Man’ played by Jason Whyte often says so much just with a stare.

This is a multi-sensory experience. The audience sitting aside a transverse stage watch and smell a fish being cooked, we hear Morepork in the distance, the sound of rain, a leaking roof (hope draining away?), people bathing – it all make us feel intimately connected to the action – the sense of foreboding is real. This is powerful theatre.

After Circa’s earlier serving of August: Osage County I was initially reluctant to see anything else. It is a hard act to follow but The Lead Wait can stand tall.
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The two plays, The Lead Wait and Death and the Dreamlife of Elephants, now occupying within a day of each other Downstage and Circa, first appeared at Bats during the STAB experimental seasons of, respectively, 1997 and 2009. The devised Dreamlife and Jo Randerson’s The Lead Wait both burrow away in their totally different dark styles in search of the truth. 

If Dreamlife uses Hollywood’s film noir for its basic framework then The Lead Wait also has a distant connection with America: the heightened realism of an O’Neill drama. There’s the same rural isolation, the same sense of foreboding, and the intensity of the underlying emotions that destroy already dysfunctional relationships. There’s also the same O’Neill-like reliance on the use of theatrical symbolism. 

Jo Randerson’s play, however, is Kiwi through and through. Set in a remote house in the bush (subtly suggested by Chris Ward and Gil Eva Craig’s sound design) that is being haphazardly renovated over many years by Leon (Scott Wills). He lives with his sister Juliet (Heather O’Carroll) and her sad little boyfriend Ian (Richard Chapman). 

Into this strange household arrives Juliet’s old flame, Man (Jason Whyte) who seven years before left after some tragic accident. Is it guilt that has brought him back or was he just passing through? Neither Juliet nor Leon wants to see him and Ian just hopes this stranger might be kind to him unlike Leon who bullies and teases him. 

Not much happens for a while though all four takes turns having a bath (a ritual cleansing?) in the unfinished bathroom, a fish is gutted, cooked and eaten, stories (some shaggy dog, some just jokes and some with a deeper meaning for the play) and slowly (a bit too slowly at times) actions and speeches start to coalesce and make sense of the malaise that Ian feels hovers over the house. And all the while Leon has manic outbursts of digging holes and burrowing into the unknown dark and using canaries, to Ian’s dismay, to ensure his safety. 

The final highly charged ten minutes or so of this eighty minute play are brilliantly staged and overwhelmingly performed by all four actors. Andrew Foster’s set design of placing the dilapidated house on a transverse stage is a refreshing change for Circa and the canaries and the pile of earth that one passes on entering the auditorium all add to the mystery and intrigue that Jo Randerson has created.
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Somewhere in the middle of nowhere a skeletal house, stripped for renovations, is occupied by a brother and sister – Leon and Juliet – and their younger boarder, Ian.

Leon, who obsessively digs holes instead of completing the renovations, is childish in his supposedly playful malevolence towards Ian. Ian is childish in his idealistic love for all living creatures and in his rare outbursts of anger. Juliet is the boss, sort of.

But they are lost. They don’t know what to do or how to live. Their parents, it seems, abandoned them long before they were ready or able to take full responsibility for their own wellbeing.

It is the arrival – the return, after a long absence – of a nameless man that is the catalyst for all this to be revealed, obliquely, confrontationally, through distorted memories, stories and parables. He is not welcome; not least because there is not enough food to feed them all. But he has brought a fish. And he cooks it for them.

The first word Leon utters, by the way, on seeing the Man arrive, is “Jesus.” The play is replete with metaphor and allegory, and therein lies its challenge and its richness.

The Lead Wait was first created in 1997 by playwright Jo Randerson with a group called Trouble (director Andrew Foster, actors Jason Whyte, Scott Wills, Jo Smith and Tim Spite), as a BATS / STAB commission.

In her excellent introduction to the published script,* Randerson describes it as a play about “the lost generation who grew up in the Rogernomics user-pays system, alone and attempting to raise ourselves. I do not mean our parents didn’t love us (they did), but on a societal level, the generation above us grew up with the benefits of the welfare state, then designed a system where their children had to pay their own way.” By ’97, or course, those policies had been implemented even more so by Ruth (Ruthenasia) Richardson and sustained by Bill Birch.

The looming spectre of a Don Brash-led ACT Party influencing the National Government’s treasury benches after the next election makes this revival timely, not that it was planned that way: a play called Equivocation by American Bill Cain, set in “Shagspeare’s London, 1605”, had been scheduled for this spot but some issue arose over getting the rights, I believe. And even when The Lead Wait was scheduled, the Brash factor had not kicked in. Call the timing serendipity, then.

Many of the original team are involved in this production. Andrew Foster directs and designs the set again, setting it in the traverse at Circa. The audience passes a washing line, a mound of dirt and a large cage of budgerigars en route to their seats, on either side of the stripped house frame.

Two problems arise with this configuration: speech fades considerably for the audience on one side when actors speak to the other (maybe judiciously placed baffles could mitigate this problem); the sense of remoteness and isolation is diluted by seeing a wall of humanity as the backdrop. On the positive side, we see ourselves and each other implicated in the situation.

Original sound designer Chris Ward, assisted now by Gil Eva Craig, transports us to a wilderness rich in bird song, powerful weather and abstract sounds of something ominous impending. And Nathan McKendry is now the designer of excellent lighting.  

Reprising the role he created 14 years ago, Scott Wills keeps us guessing about Leon with a volatile performance. Despite his apparent calmness at times, something is gnawing at him deep down. Is he a hard worker with a mean streak, a sadistic bastard or just plain crazy?

Jason Whyte played Ian in the original production and now plays the un-named Man, more centred within himself than Leon but still compellingly enigmatic. Has he returned – from “a town with a giant rugby ball” – to escape that culture, to bring them love and humanity or is he feeling the guilt Leon assumes he must carry and therefore seeking forgiveness and redemption?

Stepping into the role of Ian is Richard Chapman, touching in the way he vacillates between innocent vulnerability and being ‘one of the boys’. It’s intriguing that although he seems to be Juliet’s lover, there is no overt show of affection between them.  

Heather O’Carroll’s Juliet clearly likes to be in control; to have some semblance of order in their day-to-day existence.  The effects on her of the Man’s return, and her response to discovering Ian’s plans, are subtly yet strongly conveyed, in contrast to her utter frustration at the state of their abode.

The bathroom is exposed to the kitchen dining area and throughout the play each character takes a bath, literally and metaphorically. This too can be read in different ways. Is each contaminating the next or are they – Leon and Ian, at least – being cleansed, given the Man was the first to bathe then the others use the same water. (Juliet runs a fresh bath for herself.)

It’s a judgement call for each of us to make, as to whether there is a ‘truth’ to be found such enquiries. I rather think (and would love to be proved wrong) that the 1997 answer to many of the enigmas and ambiguities would be that they wanted to leave these questions open so the audience could invent their own answers. I personally regard that rationalisation as a cop-out because it robs us of the trust required to motivate our search for the play’s true meaning.  

The play builds, inexorably, to a major revelation that simultaneously explains the Man’s absence and the effect his return has had on Juliet and Leon, and raises fundamental questions of culpability and responsibility. If we do not feel compelled to work out exactly what happened and why, then contemplate the moral implications, we are in danger of short-changing ourselves and the play.  

The hole digging is a major motif that can also be taken various ways. Leon claims to dig them for a variety of reasons but his favourite times are when he wanders round like some sort of enormous diving rod. “I get this feeling in my feet and legs, it’s a kind of heaviness, a weighty heaviness that draws me to a spot on the ground and I know this is where I need to dig. Apparently Jesus was like this. He’d get a feel for a place, he’d been drawn to it and he’s know – something needs to change here so let’s have a miracle.” And yet Leon’s hole-digging has ruined the huge vegetable garden the Man planted years ago.

Apart from all the other questions this raises, this is the moment that alerts me to the title, which must surely be a clue. I have only ever heard the “Lead” of the title pronounced as in the heavy metal, and “Wait” is obviously a play on words. But given the plethora of biblical references (many more than I have mentioned), I find myself wondering if one interpretation is that they are waiting for some kind of second coming; for someone to lead (as in guide) this lost generation beyond their childish ways and into maturity.

Then there are the canaries: the use Leon puts them to and the way he rationalises their role in the face of Ian’s upset about it. When a live canary is brought into the action, placed in a smaller cage … Suffice to say it adds to the drama of a blistering climax that leaves what little they had to stand on shattered.   

And yet in the revelation of this truth and the explosion of emotion it brings, there is the potential for understanding, forgiveness, redemption and a moving on to something more life-affirming. Or is there? This is a very valid question to leave us with, I feel.

In a lesser production the ending could descend into bathos, not least because the shock is a big one to confront and laughing at it could be easier. The opening night audience was riveted and the applause was deservedly strong and sustained.

I have in the past complained that Circa has tended to produce challenging plays from overseas while limiting their homegrown content to comedies. The Lead Wait is a very welcome change of direction. It makes a potent statement about the society we created to take us into the new millennium. Everyone of voting age should be sure to see it. I’d recommend buying the play script,* too, for the extra value of Randerson’s introductions.

Jo Randerson and Trouble may have been seen as precocious and provocative back in the day but this new production of The Lead Wait proves they were on to something that has stood the test of time. In election year especially, by way of consolidating the values we want to live by, we owe it to ourselves and future generations to engage with it.  
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*Included in Two Plays by Jo Randerson, published by Playmarket (2010) with The Unforgiven Harvest, in the New Zealand Play Series, and available at the Circa box-office throughout the season
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