"There's nothing like it. Playwriting can take you anywhere"
Oscar Kightley

Dave Armstrong

 

Janie Walker learns the facts of life from Dave Armstrong

When I was a kid I read that book, Where Do Babies Come From? For a while there, I thought my Dad found me in his beer at the pub.

Now that I'm a grown-up, I'm more interested in titles like Where Do Playwrights Come From And How Did They Get There?

One answer to that question would read something like this: Playwrights come from funky houses next to the zoo in Wellington and they have cats called Barry Manilow and Lola. At least Dave Armstrong does.

After the success of his play Niu Sila and the still-in-progress success of King and Country, he's obviously ‘made it' as a playwright.

Dave Armstrong thinks that's rubbish. "I'm a failed maths teacher who's delighted that no one's found me out yet. I feel like a con artist," he says. "My father used to say ‘This country has an artistic establishment and heaven help anyone that's not part of it.' If we do have an artistic establishment I definitely don't feel part of it," he says.

Armstrong has been writing funny lines for seventeen years, mainly for television. His credits include Skitz, Bro' Town, Public Eye, The Semisis and Spin Doctors (for which he won an AFTA television award for best comedy script). In the 90s he wrote words for Te Papa, Axis Advertising Awards, Marmalade Video and Housing New Zealand.

He's also written a book, True Colours, covering the 1996 general election. The book was described by Warwick Roger as ‘The best book written about New Zealand politics, and one of the best books written about New Zealand.'

Niu Sila, which he co-wrote with Oscar Kightley, premiered at Downstage in 2004 and has had seasons in almost every professional theatre in New Zealand. His play King and Country is doing the festival circuit and Circa commissioned him to write The Tutor, which will premier at Circa Studio in November this year. And there are four other play titles in his file at Playmarket.

"I'm delighted by Niu Sila's success, but to go around saying I'm successful? What does that mean? I'm certainly still paying off my mortgage. I had a full time job as a TV writer, so had I made it then? You've never made it. There's lots of things I want to do. I've got millions of ideas for plays. I've never written a novel. There's no career plan, no master plan. Success is great but you don't expect it. You do your best and you hope people like it. People become a cropper when they think they are successful."

A common thread in how Armstrong's projects are developed is that he allows his ideas to marinate until the optimum moment. Niu Sila was written seven years before its first production and The Semisis started as a three-minute sketch. Armstrong's current TV project, Seven Periods With Mr Gormsby, started as a theatre monologue fifteen years ago. "Me and Danny Mulheron wrote it for a late night show at Bats theatre. Everyone liked it, although some were shocked and outraged. We did it again at Downstage for a comedy festival and in Auckland. Then Danny was sitting in a meeting with TVNZ and Tony Holden said, ‘Got anything else?' and Danny talked about Mr Gormsby. All the fictitious characters that were in Gormsby's head we now had to make into real characters. We didn't start by going ‘We've going to make a million dollar TV series' because we would have been kidding ourselves. We got to the essence of the humour and put that on at Bats at 11 o'clock at night. Then we refined it."

"I germinate ideas. Good things take time. And you have to throw a lot of ideas out," says Armstrong.

Another thread in Armstrong's work is that he writes what hasn't been seen on a New Zealand stage before. "There's one line in Niu Sila that used to crack everybody up - ‘Bloody islanders. They use their stoves as heaters,'" he says.

"Without trying to sound PC, I think it's very hard to write about contemporary New Zealand without a good knowledge of Asian, Samoan or Pacific Island and Maori issues. It's not about just thinking you should, it's about their stories being so bloody interesting. So it's like cooking without spices. I don't care about representation, only in telling it like it is."

Armstrong says that if you're written a Chinese character who gambles, people think you're saying that all Chinese gamble. "I used to worry about it but now I don't. In King and Country two of the characters are Maori and one of them steals stuff. But that happened, and the other Maori character doesn't - he's a very honest and god-fearing. But the other one steals, and that makes him a great character.

"You get what I call the Sri Lankan Motorbike Gang Phobia. People are scared to write about Maori characters that are violent, say, so they make the violent character a Pakeha, or middle class. That's all right because you do get violent Pakehas but it doesn't quite ring true. I got censored for something one time because I wrote a Maori gang member, so I said, ‘Shall we should make it a Sri Lankan motorbike gang then?'"

The people who are most worried about being called racist are the ones who are ignorant, says Armstrong. "They don't want to get found out how ignorant they are."

"One guy in my soccer team said he loves theatre because you suddenly realise you're not the only person thinking that. I love that. That's why I do it. You want your audience to go, ah, you too huh. Oh god, you thought that and you felt bad about thinking that. Yah."

Another thread - Armstrong knows when to involve other people. "One thing I have learnt through working in television is I know when a play needs a workshop, or a talk, or everyone to shut up and let me get on with it. I don't sit in rooms for hours and hours saying, ‘What can I do?' I do a little bit of that, but more often than not I realise it needs to be seen by people and I need to see it on the floor. You've got to go through quite a lot of process and it can take a bit. Process is very important to me."

Missing deadlines is not a part of Armstrong's process. But acknowledging process can also mean acknowledging flexibility which has been the case with his commission for Circa.  "The hardest thing is saying to someone, ‘Look I know I haven't delivered it but I'll get there. I had a really interesting experience with The Tutor because I did a draft and wasn't happy with it. I got feedback from the director and then we did a workshop that exposed grievous flaws. We didn't even have a reading at the end of the workshop because the play was in such a parlous state. It was one of the most back to basic experiences I've had. It was scary," he says.

Armstrong has twenty pages of ideas stuffed in a bottom draw. Marinating.  "There's a lot of good material if you just shut up and listen. For example, quite a lot of people think I've written a clever, brilliant line but I've just heard it and used it. If you can get yourself in situations where you're not the dominant culture then you find really interesting things, like the (father) character in The Tutor, he's so funny. ‘Geezzz I'd love to fuckin' have you as a tradesman, I'd say, have you painted the house, and you'd say, no but I've changed its attitude.' I know guys like that. You couldn't write that without knowing those sorts of people. You've got to know them well so you can write for them."

Armstrong thinks there are epic stories in suburban streets and kitchen sinks. "And it's just a matter of them being told.  New Zealand is a very rich country for that sort of thing. Sometimes drama is in the weirdest places."

Finding the time to write is the reason why Armstrong hasn't written more plays. Although he thinks that time can be an excuse. "I worked with someone who had a full-on day job and he wrote three novels between the hours of 5am and 7am. How much do you want to do it? Without sounding right wing, get up."

Armstrong thinks he's either a dramatist with a light touch or a comedian with something to say. "If I go to a play and it's just funny and light, then there's no point to it. Or if it's not political, or doesn't have something to say about the human condition, I'm bored. And if I go and it's heavy and full of messages and there's no lightness, I get bored. For me being boring is the most offensive thing anyone can do.

"I don't feel at the height of my powers. I still find it the hardest thing to write a play.

I'm a big respecter of theatre. And writing is the most honest profession there is. There are no short cuts."

Playwrights come from anywhere - they are born as playwrights and they grow up that way, they listen and wait, they work damn hard and they trust their ideas. Like Dave Armstrong.