Shakespeare had more than a passing interest in fathers and daughters – think King Lear, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Titus Andronicus. On the evidence of John Smythe’s play, Where There’s a Will, he too knows a bit about the subject!

Skillfully weaving scenes from the aforementioned plays with an unfolding contemporary story, Smythe invites his audience to consider the nature of theatricality (the play is cleverly directed by David Lawrence) and the ways in which the artifice of theatre can be employed to reveal the truth. 

Smythe himself takes one of the two male leads; the other is played by veteran actor John Marwick. After a slow start the play gets into gear, rollicking along with scenes from Shakespeare interspersed with the unfolding of the relationship between the two men: one a highly successful international actor (Marwick), the other a wannabe who has spent his professional life teaching.

In the background, but very much in control of events, is the stage manager/director affectingly played by Neenah Dekkers-Reihana. 

Exactly where this play fits in Shakespeare’s lexicon of genres is hard to say. Tragic moments collapse into farce, comedy abounds, and there is an ending straight out of romance drama with Dekkers-Reihana acting as the deus ex machina. 

Marwick and Smythe play well together: Smythe’s comic timing is exemplary. The play would benefit by cuts to some of the Shakespearean extracts, but at just under 90 minutes it is never less than entertaining.

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John Smythe’s serious comedy Where There’s a Will sets off on its 90 minute voyage with a mysterious stage manager hiding as a mannequin (later to appear as the live statue in The Winter’s Tale) in a rehearsal room where two old actors are about to audition. 

James Moody, star of the Royal Shakespeare Company, sci-fi blockbusters and the Tolkien sagas, is now back home in Wellington in search of artistic fulfilment. Barry Scanlan is a theatre lover, an amateur actor, and (inevitably) a retired school teacher. They quickly realise, they are like the two tramps in Waiting for Godot, waiting for a director to turn up. [More]

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Because Wellington is so small, and because Theatreview is primarily for an audience of theatre practitioners, (as opposed to, say, the Dom Post, where a review is more likely to be read by a member of the general public wondering what to do this weekend), it is worth talking about this. It is worth clearing the air with it. John Smythe must be the most prolific reviewer in Wellington and may even have seen more plays than anyone in the city, but is not often directly involved in productions himself. For many people, this alone would be a reason to see the play, and while part of that would be curiosity, I have no doubt that another motivating factor would be the desire to see whether his work can match his own standards, and that of course has the potential to open up a huge area of debate about the role of the reviewer and whether you can make theatre and critique it at the same time, whether creating the work makes you more transparent, more vulnerable, more plausible and trustworthy as a reviewer, or whether it proves that you had no right to be reviewing at all, and the purpose of reviews in general.

Yes, it does make you more vulnerable. When you write reviews, you are claiming that your opinion is somehow worth something, worth something that the opinion of someone who is not writing reviews is not worth. When you then switch roles and create theatre yourself, you are taking off the high-value opinion you have dressed yourself in and saying, “Okay, my turn. Here I am alone. What am I worth?”

In my high-value opinion (now that it is recorded on Theatreview and not drifting away with the nicotine smoke and vapours out the front of BATS), this is an enormous, even tremendous, act of bravery, one that I’m not so sure I could carry out myself.

Interestingly, vulnerability and bravery are often the main approach to shows directed by David Lawrence, and are also primary themes of the actual script.

John Smythe, also the playwright, plays the fallible-yet-endearing Barry Scanlan, a retired secondary school drama and/or English teacher, who is thrilled to be auditioning for an MA student’s big project, hoping it will be his lucky break. John Marwick plays James Moody, a local actor who has made it big overseas and has returned to escape some tabloid scandal, while attempting to hold onto his last scraps of dignity.

The two spend most of the play trapped together in a rehearsal room, or possibly a props cupboard, while waiting for the mysterious director to appear and audition them, and yes, it’s supposed to remind you of very many famous plays. Overtly, the play revolves around Shakespeare. Covertly, it is Absurdist all the way through, with a faint trace of plot. The actor and aspiring actor spend a lot of time running father-daughter snippets from Shakespeare plays, all of which are intended to bring the two closer together or to shed some light on their situation, but the two clowns (think any famous pair of clowns from any famous play) just don’t get what’s going on.

This felt tense and awkward for a long time, because as the audience, I wasn’t at all sure whether the plot was supposed to be so obvious or whether the grand reveal was meant to be a grand reveal for the audience too. I was greatly relieved when the character played by Neenah Dekkers-Reihana finally mentioned that an audience would have cottoned on ages ago, which of course, we all had – about twenty minutes into the play. It ends with all characters, who have spent the play judging characters from Shakespeare, no longer having anything left to hide and being forced to be bravely honest with each other and apply those same judgements to themselves.

The strangely-acted Shakespeare segments are not the most efficient way of telling a story and may be pretty hard on audience members who do not know at least half the Shakespeare canon back to front. I am a mere Shakespeare appreciator. Shadowed by people like David Lawrence and John Smythe, I never even claim to know Shakespeare plays at all, and I started reading them with my mum when I was eight.

The basic rehearsal room set by Harriet Denby is truly lovely – both familiar and stylised at the same time. The lighting cues (operated by Carolyn Dekkers, design not credited in the programme) always elicited a good string of laughter.

Being performed in Wellington as it is, the key point of this show is really that John Smythe here puts on a mask, and in doing so, takes one off and reveals himself, as we’ve all heard said about masks a thousand times before. It’s hard to see this play purely objectively without being a total stranger to Wellington. For this play to live or die on its own merit alone, it would have to be performed elsewhere, and it’s precisely the nature of the script that would make that so difficult. Certainly it lends itself to adaptation quite easily, but then it becomes the same scenario again in another city.

It’s a play for local theatre practitioners, by someone who is not only a reviewer or occasional actor, but now fully a theatre practitioner himself. It’s insular, but there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. We make so much theatre here that ends up being just for ourselves, even if we would rather not have it that way. This play is merely explicitly so. Even if the play had no other point than that Wellington’s most prolific reviewer de-masks and takes off his clothes, that is still a point worth having, one that is potentially quite moving, but there’s a humour and self-awareness in this, too, that is celebratory. It also just says, “We make theatre because it’s fun.” (If all our financial and personal sacrifices were from our grand sense of social responsibility, we’d be working for NGOs in Africa or helping out at Strathmore School.)

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