"Life is ugly, brutish and short. Like me."
The story of Robert Muldoon, New Zealand's populist National Prime Minister during the tumultuous years 1975-84, when the generation that suffered a depression and a world war desperately tried to hold on to a New Zealand of conservative, regulated values.
The driven figure of Muldoon is followed from his deprived childhood in the 1930s and calculated ascension to political power in the mid-1970s, through his bitter and violent retention of that power in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then to his pathetic death in the early 1990s.
This is a large-scale play with 50 scenes and over 40 speaking parts. But while there are public addresses and public occasions, this isn't a pageant play, it consists largely of a series of intimate, revealing moments.
May include many extras.