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"Let the rollercoaster take its course"
Jo Randerson
Jo Randerson
An extract from the Autumn 2008 edition of Playmarket News. To subscribe become a member here .
It has been dubbed the City Of Sales, described by Southern boy James K Baxter in his poem Ode to Auckland as looking like “an elephant’s arsehole surrounded with blue-black haemorrhoids” and, as the joke goes, as having less culture than a tub of yoghurt. We beg to differ. For this issue’s feature we went out and asked for some thoughts on an Auckland theatre scene which thus far in 2008 seems to have been constantly in a healthy state of flux.
Alison Quigan, playwright and director
There are so many Aucklands. Distance is always a problem. If you live in Mt Albert and work in Henderson, can you be bothered to travel again after work? Don't even get me started about the Shore.
In Wellington the venues that are managed or owned by the particular theatre companies. One step in the door and the audience is embraced by the culture of that particular theatre company. In Auckland the venues are city owned or managed by a casino or a University. Theatre companies visit the venues but never own them. Therefore there is no focus on developing the audience. Silo had its own space with it's own personality but now has moved on and the space is vacant - hopefully to be taken up by more experimental and younger practitioners.
Venues are the major problem in Auckland. Without them the industry will lack focus and continue to falter. We need three theatres in Auckland. An elegant space on the waterfront for ATC with rehearsal room, wardrobe, offices and two auditoriums of 550 and 200 seats.
A mid sized theatre of flexible nature (Q theatre) that can be used by Silo, and other smaller production companies. Similar to Watershed when it started. Must have good administration, rehearsal room, decent backstage areas and funding! I believe the old Silo should be used for new and emerging artists to produce low cost productions - similar to BATS in Wellington.
How do you feel about the theatre situation in Auckland at the moment? I see most of the plays at ATC but not much elsewhere. Why don't I go? Traffic, family commitments, work commitments, distance, parking. Often I just don't connect with the programme. Plays aren't always chosen with the audience in mind. Surprisingly the projects are the worst. There seem to be a lot of ‘modern classics’ done with little regard to who the audience is.
Have you had any good/bad experiences with your work lately you can tell us about? Very exciting really. I had a play of mine put on by ATC at Sky City in 2006. They have asked for more but I haven't written anything recently. Why? Concentration - I just need to sit down and...54
How do you feel about ATC? ATC have been very supportive of my work. The do produce a lot of NZ work and support NZ writers with their Literary Unit, workshops etc. I think there is a strong focus on developing NZ work.
Has Auckland changed at all over recent years? For the better or worse? When I compare the theatre scene to the late 70s I could cry. When I trained there were two funded theatres with their own spaces. Mercury Theatre (with two auditoriums) and Theatre Corporate. The industry was real - tangible. It was both gritty and glamorous. Most of all it was hugely energetic. When I came back in 2004 it was poverty stricken. On the streets. Facilities for both ATC and Silo were pathetic. 30 years ago Wellington had Downstage Theatre and a little hole in the wall Circa Theatre for the devoted. Now in Wellington there is Circa Theatre on the Waterfront, prime site and Downstage struggling but at least highly visible. In Auckland on our waterfront we have a carpark for imported cars and you couldn't drive around and point out any theatre on any site!
Why are the so many of New Zealand’s playwrights in Auckland but the majority of their premieres in Wellington?
Other work opportunities. Television, film etc. The majority of New Zealanders are also in Auckland.
Can you name any great plays about Auckland? No but then I can't name great plays about Wellington, Palmerston North or Christchurch either. … But what is a Great Play? Actually where is the great English play? Would any two people agree which one is great? … Foreskin’s Lament was a great play for its time - it opened up discussion and brought new people to the theatre in 1980. Ladies’ Night did too in 1987. Joyful and Triumphant was great, Lovelock's Dream Run. And then there is all of Roger Hall's work. Audiences will talk about his great plays and so they should - done well they are both tragic and comic and they provoke discussion. He has successfully captured and charted a whole generation of New Zealanders from the mid 70s to the present with their concerns, obsessions, successes and failures. 119
We should be writing more. Good, great and grandiose plays. John McDavitt said to me years ago when he was running Playmarket and trying to influence my programme at Centrepoint Theatre, "If you're going to choose a mediocre American or English play why not choose a mediocre NZ play? You won't just put on a play - you'll create a playwright and start an industry." He was right. I was very proud when I finished at Centrepoint Theatre that we produced 80% NZ work. And it worked at the box office. The most successful work we did was NZ written. Watching the audiences’ faces every night was magic.
No one sets out to write a Great Play - but we can write quite good ones. And Auckland is a fascinating place with so many challenges, so much beauty - so many stories. Where to begin…
An Anonymous Producer
… I accept the right of anyone not to like a show but am baffled by the standard of the criticism and the enormous discrepancies between the opinon of Wellington and Auckland critics. … Reviews often contain little constructive feedback on the production or performances and as a result it can be difficult to ascertain whether a production does diservice to the play or whether a script that was heralded in one city can simply be despised in another …The complete disregard for an independent company's efforts and prospects by some critics is enough to deter anyone in Auckland from attempting an independent production by a Kiwi playright.
On that note I was following the reviews of The Dentist’s Chair and although there are clearly some structural issues with the work almost every review I saw desperately wanted to like the piece. The incredible respect held for Indian Ink as a company meant that any criticism was completely constructive and full of hope for the future. If artists need to prove themselves over ten years before being afforded this kind of respect from critics then independent projects are doomed. Surely all critics should start with a fundamental respect for art and the efforts of the artist? 98
The apathy of the Auckland audience is also deafening to an independent producer. I believe that much of it is a reflection of the city's geography. Our sprawling suburbs, poor public transport, horrific parking prices and a CBD that a large portion of the population never visit mean that arts projects in the central city are really competing for an audience equal if not smaller than Wellington’s. To assume you are marketing to a million Aucklanders is a fallacy. A new trend seems to be to take work out into the suburbs, even touring the city with a season on the North Shore, a season in Manukau, Waitakere and even out in Franklin or Rodney. The Peripeteia co-operative are a great example of talented and entreprenuerial young theatre makers using found venues in the city fringes and selling out; their most recent production being The Tempest at a Sea Scout Hall. Children's theatre company Tim Bray Productions has also found a home in a North Shore suburb and has built a solid audience base sustaining four or more shows a year, attracting thousands in a single season. This appears to be one way of injecting new blood into the audiences for professional work in Auckland but it doesnt solve the problem of dragging them into the city and getting them to buy tickets in advance.
There also seems to be a preference amongst young companies to either devise their own work or produce classic or international scripts rather than tackle an existing New Zealand script. I am not sure how much of that is a ripple-on effect from their training, an increased familiarity with the great texts. Forums like Smack Bang, STAMP and ATC Literary Units readings provide increased exposure for New Zealand writers but perhaps there could be a kind of script library run out of the Auckland office so those thinking of making a work could read some of the unpublished scripts out there?
Auckland is full to bursting with industrious and talented theatre makers but they are constantly challenged by ongoing infrastructural issues like suitable venues, segmented media and audiences. The city's geography and local body politics are also a hurdle. While Auckland City is one of the most pro-active and visionary councils for the arts artists and audiences do not necessarily fit into the borders of Auckland City rather they sprawl into the Auckland region including Manukau, Waitakere, North Shore, Rodney, Papakura and Franklin who all have their own arts objectives and priorities.
Mike Hudson, Playwright and Producer
How do you feel about the theatre situation in Auckland at the moment?
Always interesting. Always having its ups and downs. Major issue about venues and the lack of them.
Has Auckland changed at all over recent years? For the better or worse?
The people at The Edge have really opened up their doors and accommodated a lot of events.
What are the most frustrating problems? (And how can they be solved?)
For any playwright the headache is once you’ve written your play there is no quick easy fix to get your work up. It would be great if there were a few producers on the scene who were actively looking for new plays to put on.
Events like Flip the Script, Motel Nights, 24 Hour Deadline theatre are really important. They are cost effective and get people’s work up. They are far from perfect - but at least something gets created and contacts get made.
Can you name any great plays about Auckland?
I’m working on one right now.
What should be happening with the old Silo space?
It should be mad bad and dangerous. A kind of organised chaos - allowing for all kind of experiments …
Dean Parker, playwright
Auckland theatre has been hugely enlivened by Tom Sainsbury’s plays and Stuart Devenie’s Shakespeares. The ATC has done the odd brilliant production. Silo has remarkably built itself a flash young audience, though it has largely avoided local plays in the process - which is odd when you consider its audience is exactly the sort of audience that goes to Thomas Sainsbury’s frequent productions.
The problem is that with ATC doing only seven plays a year (compared, say, to Circa’s 19 this year, 11 of them local) and Silo’s predisposition toward the latest from London and New York, there isn’t much local drama going on. Circa of course boosts its output with a studio theatre as well as a mainstage. It'd be great if the ATC was able to do the same and build a studio audience and feed that audience into the main-stage and perhaps entice some of the staider main-stage audience into a studio adventure.
Shane Bosher, Silo Artistic Director
How do you feel about the theatre situation in Auckland at the moment?
Auckland theatre is on the brink of transformation. There currently exists an opportunity to extend the pathways available for practitioners in the Auckland sector. I think what the folk at The Basement are undertaking is fantastic, and I would hope that it is well supported, both financially and in spirit.
We've been very heartened by the response that audiences have had to our transformation and in particular to our first production, Rabbit. With thanks to The Edge, we were able for the first time to concentrate on truly developing our ensemble-based ethos, letting go of the ongoing infrastructural demands of asset management which inhibited our growth in the old space. And to see such diverse (and full!) audiences clambering in the doors to go to Rabbit, Where We Once Belonged and LUV is a testament to how Auckland theatre has changed and grown in the last ten years. The audience keeps continuing to shift, change and grow.
What does Q Theatre mean to you?
Q Theatre is absolutely necessary for the continued growth of the Auckland performing arts sector. I would hope that it goes ahead - in whatever form, guise or construction. I would hate to see it falter and fall at this critical stage, especially with such a groundswell of support and demand behind it.
Has Auckland changed at all over recent years? For the better or worse?
The city itself keeps getting bigger, with the population predicted to increase to capacity in the coming years. For New Zealand's biggest city though, we still have yet to figure out what that truly means. We may be metropolitan in our aspirations, but we're suburban and sluggish in practice. The infrastructures of this city are complex, yet the vision of some of our current City Councillors is limited and often simplistic.
What are the most exciting developments?
The new management team at The Edge. Greg Innes is a very clever man who understands that any strategy is only as good as the people implementing it. With new recruits like Melanie Smith, Craig Cooper, Angela Gourdie and Shelley McMeeken on board, I think we're going to see some very exciting things from The Edge in the near future, and we're thrilled to be working alongside them.
For Silo Theatre, we're very excited to see the investment that we've made in professional development paying such fantastic dividends. People such as Mia Blake, Caroline Bell-Booth, Jonny Cross, Toni Potter, Fasitua Amosa and Morgana O'Reilly [to name only a few] really are kicking at the top of their game, and to see them continually delivering such exciting work makes us feel as proud as punch.
The forward drive of independent practitioners such as Julie Nolan, Margaret-Mary Hollins, Trygve Wakenshaw, Ben Crowder, Tom Sainsbury and Madeleine Hyland is also very inspiring. Doing it well, despite the odds. Long may it continue [the work that is, not the struggle].
What are the most frustrating problems? (And how can they be solved?)
It's the odious old funding debate I'm afraid. Auckland contributes a third of the country's economy, houses a third of the population, yet only receives [and so on and so on ........]
Auckland needs more producers like Lauren Hughes. Truly creative, truly passionate. Emerging producers could learn a lot from her.
As a producer, there is a commercial reality that needs to be applied to the presentation of new work. Sadly, this means that a lot of the work that we've read in recent times has been unable to be programmed, despite its artistic merit, simply due to the risk that this places on the producing organisation. When I hear that fantastic new plays such as The Cape are struggling to meet budget I despair. This could easily be resolved with a new funding mechanism for new work, whereby the producing organisation is guaranteed against loss.
As an industry, we also have a tendency to celebrate failure rather than success. It's rare that we strike gold in this industry, and I think when we do, we need to allow ourselves to make more of a song and dance about it.
Why are so many playwrights in Auckland but the majority of their premieres in Wellington?
The cost of presenting work in Auckland is much higher than anywhere else in the country. What may cost you fivek to stage a piece of work in Wellington, in Auckland costs 30k. The cost of living is also much higher and married to the geographical complexity of the city, this means that many practitioners are unable to commit to projects on a profit-share basis, which is often the only way of getting new work up.
Can you name any great plays about Auckland?
Toa Fraser's Bare. When we revived it last year, Gilbert Wong described it as an instant classic that is as much of an homage to Auckland as Woody Allen's Manhattan. Couldn't say it better myself, really. It's an absolutely glorious piece of writing.
Auckland! the Musical! Vivienne Plumb, playwright
It’s the opening night of the musical entitled ‘Auckland!’ I’m playing the lead, a young wide-eyed oohing and aahing gal from the sticks - otherwise known a place called Wellington – and I’ve come to the Big Smoke. The set features the Sky Tower in all its colours of the night such as silver, or red and green, and this acts as an important metaphorical emblem for the entire musical. And Auckland city itself is represented as a generous, big-bosomed, large skirted, friendly landlady type who takes me to her heart and into her life and shows me all the mystical and magical permutations of this alluring city.
Then there’s a splendid twenty-strong chorus of gorgeous-voiced Maori road workers, dressed beautifully in their silver and orange safety jerkins. They do some joyous roadwork dancing and it is they who sing the title number, ‘Auckland!’, besides a few of the other big its of the show, such as ‘Ponsonby on a Sunday’ and the cheeky lyrics of ‘K Road on a Saturday Night’.
A tight-knit Chinese student contingent put in some astonishing acrobatics in scene five and some excellent juggling with chemistry textbooks in scene eight, and then there’s the finale: a starburst of fireworks with me tapdancing my little heart out up the very front and everyone else behind me waving fire safety-approved faux sparklers.
Oh well, so far it’s only been performed in my imagination but Aucklanders do always ask you if you saw the fireworks. These seem to happen on a regular basis in the City of Sails with them receiving maybe 50.6% more sparkling extravaganza than the rest of the country. But maybe they shouldn’t forget it’s an old trick of government - in ancient Rome they liked to give the public bread and circuses too.
At the very beginning of 2008 I moved from Wellington to Auckland to work on a new project – a commission from the Auckland Theatre Company to turn my short story, ‘The Wife Who Spoke Japanese In Her Sleep’, into a performance piece for he stage. I wanted to set it in Auckland and felt it was important to be there while I worked on the script. I lived here in 2001 while I held the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship but these days Auckland feels even more sprawling, even more multicultural, and at the present there is some fascinating theatre politics going on in the town.
After ten years, eight reports, and a vast amount of lobbying and fundraising, everyone seemed to be behind the creation of a new 350-460 seat theatre that would be tucked around the back of the Auckland Town Hall and named Q Theatre for its close proximity to Queen Street. But after the last local body elections Auckland had a new mayor, John Banks, and during February the new council delayed their previous commitments of capital and operational funding, asking instead for yet another report. At the same time the Auckland Theatre Company, who receive a large lump of funding from Creative New Zealand but have no venue of their own, expressed a desire for a bigger 550 seat venue rather than the smaller Q Theatre.
And to add to the mix, the Silo Theatre, the alternative venue most equivalent to Wellington’s BATS, has just made a move into the Herald Theatre in the Aotea Centre. In its old space they could only seat 100 and even if a show did well they could never make much money from it. The old Silo basement performance area is apt to become claustrophobically hot in summer. The ceilings are so low that the story goes that when Jennifer Ward-Lealand was presenting her one-woman show about Marlene Dietrich that required her to lie on the piano during the performance, she found she only had to raise her leg a little before she could touch the ceiling with her toe.
The 186 seat Herald Theatre is a very steeply raked space where the top row of audience seating feels almost vertiginous, if there is such a word. It is situated at the back of the Aotea Centre, has no street frontage, and many Aucklanders are still not aware of its actual geographical position. My own play, The Cape, directed by Celia Nicholson, had a season here throughout February. Thankfully it is air conditioned but it is not a well-liked or well-loved theatre space and we have yet to see how the Silo audience will take to the place.
With all this theatrical activity going on up north it was the right time for Playmarket to open a branch office in Auckland. It still holds its bigger Wellington office but shares floor space in Auckland with the Q Theatre and the Massive Company, an Auckland based group that produces devised theatre pieces. My young friend, Geneva Alexander-Masters, auditioned for and was accepted to perform in their new show. There were eighty-five hopefuls and only eleven accepted. Geneva has just finished school and this is her first year working in the industry. The Girls Show (working title) is being devised by the girls who are actually in it, who come from all walks of life and range in ages from fifteen to twenty. It will run from July 16 – 26th.
It’s encouraging and exciting to see so much theatre happening here in the City of Sails. There’s lots of argument and debate and I think that augers well for the life of future Auckland theatre. Now I’m just waiting for the next instalment of fireworks.