It's not often you can make the world a better place without it costing you money, time or effort. But when it comes to the live arts, there's one utterly free, utterly painless thing you can do to increase your enjoyment, improve artists' lives and make a big difference: 

At the end of every show you see, stand up and applaud. 
 
I'm talking like tipping in America, or 5-star Uber ratings: by default. Whether you judge what you've seen to be genius, run of the mill or barely tolerable, stand the fuck up. Why? Why not? 

1. YOU'RE ABOUT TO STAND UP ANYWAY. Once the performers have left the stage, you're going to get up and leave. Stand up 30 seconds earlier, stretch those legs and make everyone feel better - including yourself - Because
2. THIS WAY, YOU MIGHT ENJOY IT MORE: Standing and applauding will make you feel you had a better time than you really did. It's the secret that people who sit through Presidential State of the Nation addresses and those who pay $600 for a ticket to the Met learned long ago. A standing ovation puts you back in charge of your entertainment experience. Be the cherry on your own top. 
3. THE PERFORMANCE IS JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG. You know those awful stories you hear about artists' lives? It's worse than you could ever imagine. Work is scarce, the money is terrible, personal dignity is under constant assault. The only reason anyone does it is because they genuinely want to make their communities better places to be and this is the best way they can think of. Who cares how that manifests itself on stage? That deserves a standing O. 
4. 'I'M SPARTACUS': Standing ovation by default is a little flashmob. When you stand with me, or for me, I know you're part of the club. Membership is open, the fee is standing up. If enough people do it it becomes a part of the culture. It becomes a movement. It becomes something that people come to shows to be part of. Many sports, public and cultural events are made better by the crowd. This option is open to theatre, but we rarely take it.
5. IT'S LIKE TIPPING. But free. In America, tipping makes no sense. Oh, you didn't like the food? What's that got to do with the person who dropped the plate in front of you? Didn't get a smile? Fuck you. The world should be different. But it’s not. Only arseholes don't tip. YOU WOULDN'T NOT CLAP. So why don’t we evolve this tradition by the length of our legs. Let’s make it that you wouldn't not stand.
6. WHAT ARE YOU? A CRITIC? So you hated it. I hate to break it to you, but you have no way to convey that to me from the audience. You're never going to boo. Not coming doesn't work either: there’s so many other reasons you might not turn up that I always assume it’s one of those. If everyone stands by default, then the message of those audience members not in wheelchairs or otherwise incapable of standing would come thru loud and clear:  I suck. So if you want to have the power to play the that card, all you need to do give standing ovations to anything barely tolerable.  

We mutter at openings, conferences and awards nights. We founder on rocky questions. Is it a building? Where? Is there an artistic director? Who? But it costs too much and takes too long and we’re all too stuck in our regional biases and the free drinks have run out and we turn to simpler pleasures like belting out some R Kelly at a k-bar[1].
 
I think there’s a different way. A way that costs as little as nothing. A way that asks no one to change what they’re doing or where. A way that amplifies what’s already going on. It weighs as much as a stamp. It’s a stamp.
 
My idea for a national theatre isn’t nicked from England. It’s nicked from the ‘Buy New Zealand Made’ organisation. If you want to get that tag on your product, you have to do is tick some boxes.[2] It’s designed to give customers and retailers confidence. They know where the product is from and what that means.
 
To do something similar for theatre, we come together like an online (but ideally physical) version of the US founding fathers and nut out what constitutes a piece of New Zealand theatre. If your company or production meets this clear criteria, you can apply for accreditation and you’re guaranteed to be approved.
 
You get to use the logo on everything related to your show and its marketing. Your production is welcomed into an online platform that creates a sense of community for the makers and offers curious audiences a way to discover the best of NZ theatre everywhere it’s happening. A sense of national cohesion is created through a media aggregator and dedicated podcasts, previews, interviews and reviews.  And of course, there’s a big awards extravaganza at the end of the year, integrated into the growing trend of fantastic regional awards.
 
And what does it all cost? Technically, nothing. With a bit of goodwill from designers, administrators and users, this could all be free and sustainable. But if we wanted to do it really well, it wouldn’t take much. Small annual subscriptions for companies and audiences would help. So could a $1 per ticket levy on NT productions. In a perfect world we might start to get $1+ a ticket from overseas shows – that way Mary Poppins at Court could entertain hundreds of people a night while raising thousands of dollars for the articulation of New Zealand’s national theatre. With a bit of cashflow there would be the possibility of show development, marketing and production support for NT shows, and publication, education and after-school programmes to get NZ theatre embedded in the minds of kiwi kids. There could also be money to support the creation of podcasts, reviews and awards and NT shows could benefit from bulk advertising deals with phantom, facebook and newspapers. But none of this means anything unless the shows are good.
 
How can we guarantee that? Well, we’re not changing anything. So let’s look at what’s on right now. To get a sense of what our programme could have looked like this month, I’ve lazily copied and pasted from the Playmarket newsletter: In Auckland we have Silo’s Hudson & Halls Live[3], Nga Puke[4] at Te Pou, and Stephen Lovatt and Roger Hall’s delightful Christmas Day gathering on Takapuna beach for a scene from End of the Golden Weather[5]. In Palmerston North Centrepoint is presenting Boys at the Beach.[6] In Dunedin, Flagons and Foxtrots is on at The Fortune[7]. In Wellington Robin Hood plays at Circa[8] and Mrs Merry's Christmas Concert[9] is at Nextstage. I’d also entertain applications from Jesus Christ Part II[10] at the Basement and Christ Almighty[11] in Melbourne. There might be more.
 
So not a bad month for the national theatre – 8 plays throughout NZ and Australia all playing to good crowds and strong reviews. A mix of strong new work and return seasons of proven kiwi classics. The Circa pantomime and The End of the Golden Weather are now long-standing annual traditions. Over the course of a year, I reckon our National Theatre would produce more than 60 productions and numerous readings, workshops and conferences. It would be a constant advocate for the theatre to educational institutions and the media.
 
With a bit of will this could get off the ground pretty quickly. I feel like the biggest sticking point won’t be the who or the how. It’ll be the name. What do we call it? I don’t want to start another flag debate, but my preference is that it wouldn’t be called the National Theatre of New Zealand.

[1] “It’s a city of justice, a city of love/ It’s a city of peace for every one of us/ And we all need it/ Can’t live without it/ Gotham City/ Oh yeah" (repeat)

[2] And pay some cash. But that’s not useful to my argument at this point.

[3] Kip Chapman with Todd Emerson and Sophie Roberts,

[4] By John Broughton

[5] By Bruce Mason

[6] By Alison Quigan & Ross Gumbley

[7] By Alison Quigan & Ross Gumbley

[8] by Roger Hall. Lyrics by Paul Jenden, Music by Michael Nicholas Williams  

[9] by Geraldine Brophy

[10] devised by Thomas Sainsbury, Gareth Williams, Jason Smith, Lara Fischel-Chisholm and Oliver Driver

[11] by Natalie Medlock and Dan Musgrove

All those beautifully filmed shows from the West End had hardened my heart to local live theatre, then along came The Bookbinder, Gifted, Ache and Hudson & Halls Live to help me love again.
 
The Bookbinder – by Ralph McCubbin Howell, Circa 2.

First a bit about me. If you let me and Geoff yap about Hillary Clinton / Young Lover you’ll experience a whole different show to the one you see me perform. On stage, it’s basically fun-times stand-up comedy. Lots of laughs and a great night out at the talk-house. I love doing it, but get a couple of beers in us and let us rant about what’s ‘really going on’ in that show, then you’ll have the uncomfortable experience of hearing that Geoff and I feel that it’s actually so much more profound. We’ll talk about inter-generational politics, tuning into abandoned cultural frequencies, sacred taboo. Whatever helps us sleep. I think Ralph and Hannah are really talented and make great shows. Watching the Bookbinder, I feel a strain that they may not feel, that may have more to do with the me I’ve expressed above. But this is the strain: it’s like they want to talk to adults, about really serious adult issues, but somewhere in between funding, commerce, and their own artistic sense and sensibility they’ve found themselves working their magic in children’s theatre. Their publicity did everything it could to say ‘this is for adults too.’ But the ‘too’ is anything but silent. The daily 11am shows hinted at the whole truth.  Adults can come, can enjoy. It’s a sophisticated myth, cleverly theatrical, and it’s a children’s show. A really, really good one. I wish I’d known and borrowed a kid to help open their minds to the magical possibilities of theatre. But sitting there, by myself, watching, reflecting, thinking I was empathising - I felt an artistic sensibility straining at a leash. When that leash snaps (and it might happen at the NZ International Festival with their new show) Trick of the Light are either going to jump the fence and take to the streets of adult theatre like boss dogs, or they’re going to take a peek, come to terms with their default sensibility and claim the full expanse of their current home turf.
 
Ache – by Pip Hall, Circa 2.
 
Pip’s play has earned that rare honour in New Zealand theatre – a second professional production. Geoff Pinfield and I went there on an inspiration date, and we both ended up feeling the same: if all kiwi theatre felt like this, we’d be in a sunrise industry. Pip’s got an ear for the kind of dialogue that makes people giggle and gasp with recognition – “that’s exactly what I say!” With her dad’s plays, clever actors quickly learn that the smart thing to do is say the lines as written. He actually knows best. Dumb actors add and subtract as they see fit to make it ‘better’. Pip’s scripts are different. She leaves space in her lines for actors to move breathe and express themselves – not by adding lines, but by adding life. I read an early draft and it’s not a great read – the best plays aren’t, cos they’re not literature. They’re architectural plans. You can’t feel what an actor playing drunk and trying to hold it together can do to lines in the spirit of “What? Huh? Nuh.” Renee Lyons was particularly great, overflowing with humanity. I can’t tell whether Richard Dey didn’t go as deep as Renee, or whether his part was thinner. My reaction at the time was that it was the gender reverse of traditional rom coms – where the intriguing male protagonist falls in love with a thinly drawn woman primarily because she’s cute and glum. In Pip’s play, it felt to me that the main guy was relatively uncomplicated, pleasant but not particularly interesting. The kind of guy you’re with until you meet the one. As a couple, they weren’t drawn together so much as happened to find themselves at the same spot at the same time. Repeatedly. She was too good for him, so I’m glad it never worked out. The only other minor gripe I’d have is that if the show had ended after any of the last three-four scenes I would have started clapping thinking it was the end. As much as I’m looking for things other than traditional narratives, after an hour the rest was gravy. And I like gravy.
 
Gifted – By Patrick Evans, Circa 1.
 
What I was on the look-out for here was simple reportage. Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame lived together for a time: that’s reportage. I expect drama to tell me what it all means. I think it was all there Patrick Evans’ play. I think he trusted me to look and think hard for it. Most explicitly, the plot is about an established writer who offers accom to an unestablished talent. He finds his creative garden barren while hers flourishes. But again, that’s reportage (I assume it’s true that she wrote lots while he didn’t). Below that was something never explicit, but I felt pulsing: Janet flourished because she was writing honestly about herself. Sargeson was blocked because he refused to write honestly about himself. Some of that may have been due to cowardice or confusion – he was gay; the fascinating other possibility I sensed is that Sargeson was never able to truly write as himself because he felt the need to play a role: the father of New Zealand letters. He felt a solemn duty to express the national psyche. No one else was doing it. Perhaps Sargeson’s selfless actions mean that his greatest writing was killed in the course of national service. Or maybe his literary potential was fulfilled the moment he decided to let Janet Frame take up residence in his garden. So at the time of watching, I felt there was something missing, but reflecting on it now, I feel like it was all there, just never to the fore. Just like Sargeson in his own writing.
 
Hudson & Halls Live - directed by Kip Chapman
 
If this show isn’t a revelation to Silo it should be. They’ve put the gay back in gay. My experience of Silo is that it’s the North & South magazine of New Zealand theatre. Grim tales of unfortunate things happening to white people: weird sex, intoxication, yelling, aids. Lots and lots of aids. They may be happy enough to present plays about the theme of identity, but Silo’s own identity has remained elusive. “Leading producer of contemporary theatre” seems to dodge the question. Based on form, I’d say “presenter of the rotten core of the human apple.” Sophie’s taken over from Shane and there’s been more of the similar - until now. Sophie trusted Kip. Kip trusted his instinct. They made a camp show. It does everything you could want out of theatre. It’s openly itself, it’s joyful and profound, it delves into our history to find seeds of our present. It’s new born of the old, it’s the exotic other, and it’s the familiar, all at the same time. We all get it. We can laugh, groan, be moved, wierded-out and thrilled and feel others simultaneously feeling the same. Kip’s been playing around in a territory that I couldn’t get a grip on – Apollo 13, Advance & Order about the Auckland City Council. He likes bright tourism materials about NZ. He likes old campaign posters for failed election campaigns. He likes the USA.  I’ve been wracking my brain – what’s the link? Tales of sky-high optimism brought down to earth with a clunk? I think Kip sees the beauty in balls-out ambition. And he also sees the relatable humans attached to the balls. In Kip’s hands hubris becomes a stairway to beauty, rather than a slide to pity or fear. When you shoot for the moon, failure is inevitable, but it can be beautiful too. And best of all, it's totally worth it. 

Theatre seen:  A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller (Ivo Van Hove directing for Young Vic), The Hard Problem by Tom Stoppard - NT Live, Anthony and Cleopatra – Shakespeare’s Globe. Man + Superman by George Bernard Shaw – NT Live.

Every week I go to the theatre with my dad. The theatre just happens to be the Lighthouse Cinema Cuba. Every week we experience the greatest theatre in the world - virtually as if we were standing with the actors on stage. I can’t tell you how excited this makes me: I imagine it’s similar to the way people who liked music felt when the LP was invented. I can’t tell you how concerned this makes me: what’s could possibly compel me to go and see professional theatre in New Zealand? Perhaps a premiere of a new NZ show on a professional main stage, or a revival of a kiwi classic. You'll be hard pushed to get me to a NZ production of an overseas show any more. With the best will in the world, a production staged after four weeks’ rehearsal by a company of freelance contractors isn’t going to result in anything worth my while. I don’t count BATS as a professional theatre – it’s a wonderful experimental laboratory where curious audiences can witness exciting prototypes. I’m only rarely in the mood for that at the moment. It feels too much like what I do all day for a job. When I go out to the theatre I want inspiration and escape. I want to be reminded why I persist with this slippery medium. I need polish and punch. That means I need the Lighthouse Cinema Cuba.

A View from A Bridge made me so very happy and so, so sad. Happy because Miller’s story, which I thought was endemic to 50s Broadway-Style Theatre, flourishes brightly and pungently after being transplanted into Van Hove’s creative garden. This must be its finest production of all time, right? Van Hove strips it to its core: Fallible humans and deadly stakes. A second generation dockworker harbours illegal Italian immigrants. He lives by one rule: never rat. But when his beloved stepdaughter falls in love with one of his guests, he descends into a moral sewer and obliges his own destruction. It ends in a shower of blood. The play made me sad because it’s exactly the kind of production that was within the vision and abilities of our departed friend Willem Wassenaar. Now he’s gone.

The Hard Problem. My hard problem with Stoppard is that the thinky thinky talky talky stuff he’s famous for never sounds like something I’m interested in sitting through. But it’s not what his plays are actually like. I think it’s because what he does is so brilliant it’s hard to describe. Critics are forced to talk about what a play is about – i.e. the ideas. This takes up so much space that there’s no time to describe the means of delivery. So it’s as if Charlize Theron blew your mind by talking you through Garden Brain Economics. You get so excited about relating the idea to anyone who’ll listen that you forget to tell people that you learned about it from the most beautiful woman you’ve ever set eyes on. Stoppard’s skill is his ability to anchor his ideas in the human experience of his characters to the point that what we experience isn’t ideas at all, it’s people. For the record, the hard problem is ‘what causes consciousness?’ Is it a bunch of chemicals? If so, then A.I. can be synthesised, right? If not, what the heck is going on? Is there a God? Argh!!! Stoppard handles this stuff so it couldn’t be further from a lecture – he embodies the idea in multiple characters, then make them each experience it simultaneously on three levels: brain, heart and belly. The characters brain the hard problem by talking about it directly – it’s their job after all, they’re neuroscientists or something. They simultaneously heart the hard problem – it directly affects their ability to fall in love and advance in their careers. Then they belly it by getting drunk together and demonstrating how easy it is for smart humans to reduce themselves to intolerable pigs. All in 90 minutes. Wow.

I’m still a little scarred from the opening scene of the RSC production of Anthony and Cleopatra I saw 15 years ago. The curtain rose to reveal Alan Bates performing cunnilingus on Francis De La Tour. I sincerely hope you have no visual reference for either of those actors. It’s also another Shakespeare that I’ve seen several times and couldn’t have told you the plot – until now. This is politics and sexual-politics 69-ing each other on top of an erupting volcano. Antony is a warrior with the ability to rule the world. Cleopatra is a sorcerer with the ability to conjure Anthony’s triumph or destruction. They’re both unsure how to best employ their powers. Her interpersonal manipulations are  far more brilliant than his military strategies. Antony’s tragedy is all about bad luck and wrong timing. In Octavius, he just happens to come up against the ace that beats his king. His main fault, if he has one, is his pig-headed insistence on trying to do everything honourably in war, love and politics. It’s just not possible. His noble aspirations are constantly foiled. He should have learned his lesson long before he comically botches his own suicide. Cleopatra, on the other hand, pulls off the most regal death I have ever seen – sitting upright in her winged throne, eyes-closed in contemplation of eternity. Shakespeare hints that we die as we live – Antony in attempted honour and Cleopatra in godlike majesty.

Man + Superman is the first play I can remember seeing that I’ve wanted to act in. I’ve never seen a GBS play before, which is stupid, since I’ve been compared to him (some people are seriously way too kind.) I immediately feel drawn to the way Shaw seamlessly integrates the rollicking romp and the soapbox. Ralph Fiennes as the lead is the smartest man you’ll ever meet – utterly insightful  about the way the world works and how it could and should be better. And determined to tell you at any opportunity. Despite his better instincts, however, his Superman is ultimately defeated by his Man, and he finds himself voluntarily, if warily, treading the traditional path to marriage – which he knows to be the death of art. Other things I want to steal include the way GBS boldly and brilliantly turns the whole play on its head by suddenly relocating it to hell. No reason given or required. And also I learned how you play this stuff as an actor – it’s like a cartoon. Make a strong character choice and bang on with it. Fiennes choses to play this guy as a man whose ideas are bursting out of his head. They’re a burden that he physically carries through life - with dignity and humour, for sure, but still. His truth and insight are as socially crippling as the most severe physical disability. All the characters are this sassy. This talkfest rocks fast and hard. I want Geoff Pinfield, who directs me in my Richard Meros B.A. escapades, to turn his attention to Shaw. Geoff knows how to make big ideas and lots of words fascinatingly theatrical. He’s a born Shavian. 

Shows seen. Globe Hamlet, Julius Caesar, One Day Moko, Niu Sila, 2080, Beyond the Beautiful Forevers, Woyzeck. 

Man, when you put it like that it seems like I didn’t do anything in June except watch theatre, but it didn’t feel like a chore. I also managed to squeeze in the Hurricanes blistering run of form – and in watching two live games at the Cake Tin, I saw some of the finest  theatre in town.

Globe Hamlet was all about the theatre. The Opera House was the best of venues, and the worst of venues for the same reason – everything Shakespeare’s Globe does, and everything Shakespeare wrote is violently opposed to everything a 19th century end-stage theatre stands for. So to see them knock it out of the park  at the Opera House was as awesome and unexpected as watching say, a, gay, black Latino woman become pope. Or something. Hamlet changes as a play as you change as a person, and it talks to you about where you’re at at your particular point in life. The choice they made that struck a chord with me was the sense that Hamlet is theatre within theatre within theatre. At the end of Hamlet  Fortinbras commands: “Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;/For he was likely, had he been put on,/To have proved most royally:” In this version, a company of actors interprets this as a command to go tell the story as a play. Fortinbras was wasted as a warrior. He should have worked in development.

Julius Caesar to me was all about the themes. Leadership, and the hive mind. Caesar’s a good man. He’s never done anything wrong, in fact, he’s always done everything right. But all the next tier politicians and landed gentry get it in their head that he must be about to do something terrible soon. So they kill the golden goose, and merrily slaughter each other in a more horrible fashion than they ever feared Caesar would do to them. Caesar picked the problem from the start: Lean people. They think too much. I think too much and I’ve been putting on the pounds. I wonder if Caesar and I would get on.

One Day Moko. Compliment Sandwich. I really like Tim. He’s an energetic talented actor, I really like Gene, he’s a brilliant director - but for the life of me I can’t see how this wasn’t mental health blackface, and straight out blackface to boot. Tim plays a homeless man, Moko, so I assume he’s Maori. Tim becomes Moko, wears his clothes. There’s no sense of distance, no sense that this is an actor performing a role, and no sense of exactly what we’re meant to get from it.  It seems as if Tim’s claiming to be this mentally ill Maori person. Why? We spend a lot of time laughing at Moko, and therefore at people like him. Moko takes freaking song requests. If you passed someone like Moko in the street would you ask him to sing for you? Or tell you a story? Or do his funny walk? Then laugh at him? Tims’s great, Gene’s great. I’m an arsehole ‘cos half of the point of writing these things is that when I’ve got confusion about something, I’m meant to pick up the phone and talk to Tim, ask him the questions rather than speculate or wonder at the motives. But I’m lazy and scared and this one hit me in the guts in a bad way. And this might be the best way to start this conversation: Tim I’m prepared to apologise, recant, repent and take all of the above back and down. Just tell me what’s going on. Help me understand. And I mean it when I say you’re a great actor and a good bloke.

2080. Aroha and I are very fond of each other. We had a thing. 2080 has two things going on, and one’s fucking the other in an unhelpful way. The idea that doesn’t work is the whole future dystopia thing. Aroha has to spend too much mental energy setting it up, and as an audience member I spent too much of my time picking holes in it. In a hyper-technological world, why would we anyone need to work in factories? In the future, why would we bother physically separating social classes, when our current socio-economic system does this so insidiously and effectively right now? Just ask anyone who wants to buy a house in Auckland. No access to capital generated by the inherited wealth of your forebears? No mortgage for you. The idea that does work, that’s the heart of this play, that I know Aroha is really interested in and knows about because she told me and it leaps off the stage and into you, is the near impossibility of social mobility right here and now – either ambitously or romantically. If you’re born poor, you’re likely to die poor and love poor. Relationships between educated and uneducated people are virtually impossible for remarkably complex reasons that Aroha, as a perceptive human and talented artist, knows all about, and she’s only half telling us at the moment. There’s her play. She’s got a Foreskin’s Lament in her and it could be this play, revistited.

Beyond the Beautiful Forevers. “No, no, no, no, no.” As Apu might say. Apu, by the  way is a more accurate and less westernised version of an Indian human than anything on display here. This is the kind of show that makes you puke. Not at the poverty of the characters, but in the poverty of imagination of the National Theater. Desperate to tell an Indian story, but don’t trust the darkies to make one themselves? Send a white writer and a white director to India for a couple of weeks. Armed with a popular book. The result? A play in which all the people in the slums of India mysteriously want exactly what white male Londoners want. Because that’s all that’s worth having. Teenage girls stand in the slum toilet discussing Mrs fucking Dalloway, for God’s sakes. Would you do that standing in a portaloo? I don’t want to discuss Mrs Dalloway at all. And their Western ambitions would work out just perfectly if not for their inherant  corruption and lack of the very western values that they crave. Fuck off David Hare. Fuck off Rupert Norris. History will condemn this form of story telling. It already has – Amos and Andy anyone? Anyone? You can’t justify racist, myopic storytelling simply by casting Indians to say your words. I could go on but there’s no point.

Niu Sila. Yes. Dave knows how to do what BTBF was trying to do, and he knows how to do it properly. It's based in his own experiences, and he's brought Oscar Kightly on board to work with him, engage him, inspire him, inform him and help him look at inter-cultural tropes and tell inter-cultural truths, truthfully. Dave and Oscar help us laugh at ourselves and think about ourselves and our relationship to the differences of  others in the best possible way. That’s why this play is and will remain one of the most important pieces of theatre ever made in NZ. I saw it at the Court, which is a really exciting theatre to watch shows in, by the way. Nice work, Court.

Woyzeck. This was cool and refreshing. I found my mind wandering a lot during this show, but not in a disengaged way. The show creates images and juxtapositions that act as springboard for my mind to think and go places, like a controlled artistic version of staring at clouds, or like looking at an abstract painting. This is theatre as high art, and it looks as fun to perform as it is to watch. Important.

Theatre watched: Polyphony – Daniel Kitson @ Comedy Festival. A Servant of Two Masters – Circa 
Don Juan – Circa. A Doll’s House – ATC. Titus Andronicus – Globe On Screen
 
I’m the first to admit I’ve never had an original idea in my head. Doing a monthly round up of the shows I’ve seen is a direct steal from Nick Hornby’s column “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” from Believer Magazine (thanks Lily Richards). But I’m nicking this for a high-minded reason: Rosabel Tan wrote an essay on contemporarty criticism for Ellie Catton’s new website. I commented on the social gulf that seeems to exist between theatre critics and practitioners. We’re far less likely to actually talk to each other than sports journalists are to athletes, and I think that’s to the detriment of everyone. Surely what separates the commentator from the general punter is having superior access to the inner workings of the thing you’re banging on about. Anyway, I thought it might be useful to be a bit more public about what I’m watching and what I think about it. In an ideal world it would foster a bit of debate, but look at the length of it! Who could process all those words? So it’s mainly for my own benefit.  

I’d travel a long way to see a Daniel Kitson show, but I never have to because he always comes to me. What I like about  him is how he treats himself as an artist and his audience. I first saw him fifteen years ago at an open mic night in London. He was a perrier-award nominated stand-up comedian and his ability shone almost as brightly as his restlessness with the limitations of the form. My take-away as an eighteen year-old was that making people laugh isn’t satisfying enough in itself. Especially if you’re smart. I didn’t become a stand-up comic. While Geoff and I were making On the Conditions and Possibilities of Helen Clark Taking Me as Her Young Lover, Kitson was touring international festivals proving to us that there was an exciting space between stand-up and theatre - just where we were experimenting. In New York I saw Kitson in his majesty at Barrow St theatre. He punctuated stand-uppish banter with a recorded story, which looped and extended a little further each time he played it. The longer it went on, the more it made him seem like a cunt, and that in turn affected the way you listened to his jokes. The same kind of material that seemed light-hearted and quirky earlier took on sinister tones as the voice on the tape recounted a tale of how Kitson sexually humilated some poor woman. Just at the point where you don’t know whether to laugh or hiss, you get to the end of the pre-recorded story. Turns out that a playful conversation had become fixed in the storyteller’s head as a real incident. The terrible marriage between memory and reality. Boom. That took balls. The second time I saw him in NY, the famous talker hardly opened his mouth, and spent the whole night retrieving reel-to-reel recorders from the back of the cavernous St Ann’s Warehouse. He’d bring them to the front of the stage, plug them into a sound desk and play them in the right order. A story came out. Sometimes a tape would break, and that was the end of that part of the story. People who wanted the Daniel Kitson they’d heard of walked out in a steady stream and missed a profound meditation on the fallibility of memory. Every time I start to get worried about generating a consistent ‘brand’ in my work, I remind myself of how Kitson doesn't give  a fuck. He makes  a play. Then he makes another. Then another. That's how he's unmistakably Daniel Kitson.

In Polyphony (we’re there, that took a while) he delivers a deceptively rambling intro and places individual speakers in the hands of particular audience members. Everyone presses play at the same time, cueing an extraordinary play in which he talks to the various voices. This time, it’s not about memory, it’s about the future. At the time, I was a bit frustrated that most of the play revolves around the voices wanting to know what’s going to happen in the play, and DK refusing tell them. Then it's over. I felt at the time that he hadn’t taken his material beyond the form to use it to talk about whatever unspecified thing I felt was more important. Then, just now writing this, I realise that we as an audience have been trained to ask ‘what happens next’ in stories instead of just sitting and experiencing the present. It took me four weeks to realise that, and it's now the official only possible interpretation of the whole show. Copyright me. 

I’m ranting on about Kitson, but he’s worth it. Much of his shtick involves the liveness of his relationship with the audience. It reminds me of a Kanye West lyric: “the moment they like you/ make ‘em unlike you/cos kissing people’s ass is so unlike you.” Without knowing him at all, what I take heed of in Kitson is his seeming ability to both give and not give a shit. Where my audience interaction is all about fawning disarmingly, he openly takes control. I don’t like it in my own work, but I appreciate seeing it done well. In New York I saw him tear a woman to shreds for checking her phone, and in this one he cuts a woman short when she can’t play her part in the show because she’s just emerged from a long term coma. “Keep it light,” he growls, “we’ve all been in long term comas.” It’s a power game. Daddy’s going to be rough on you, but it’s so you feel safe.

Kitson’s exactly the kind of person that I’d imagine myself getting on with, so I shook his hand at the end, and hawked around for a while trying to work up the courage to ask him to dinner. Vaughan Slinn pulled this trick off with Robert LePage a few years back. But as I waited, I remembered my terrible and humiliating experience trying to talk to Shayne Carter. I decided that like tigers, these magnificent beasts are best observed in their natural environment, and from a distance. Kitson’s a creature of the stage. That’s the beginning and end of our relationship. I left him to it and went to slurp some pho.

I can’t talk about A Servant of Two Masters without talking about my preconceptions going in: Lee Hall’s translation is a poor man’s One Man Two Guvnors; Circa obviously couldn’t get the rights to the real thing; neither the cast or director are experienced in comedia; it’s going to be dire. So firm were my convictions that I wouldn’t have gone except that Colin McColl had a spare ticket. I enjoy his company and was planning to grease up to him for a new commission. At first, things couldn’t have looked less promising. The set was all painted cloths like a provincial 1960s am-dram. There were only 60 people in the 300-seat theatre. Rest-home demographic. Then the actors came out in doublets and hose. Death. From there things perk up. The cast was uniformally excellent, playing with each other and the audience. My knowledge of OM2G caused me to waste too much time wishing that big man Gavin Rutherford was playing the harlequin character rather than the greyhound who got the job; I couldn’t ever bring myself to believe food drove any of his motivations. The only thing that could have improved this was if they were a working commedia troupe, or if they got to run the play in over six months, then their good work would sharpen into something wicked. Anything else I could suggest was delivered in spades by Don Juan, which I’ve written about at length, and no one went to that. So I don’t know anything.

When I comment on this type of play I feel like a young man of the cloth who thinks Christianity could be so much funkier and more relevant than the bishops allow it to be. My mistake is to forget that many of the people who actually go to church prefer a quiet communion, and funking it up will alienate the current congregation without  attracting any new replacements. As it was, the show had a great cast, some good laughs and the audience there was seemed most satisfied. Maybe that’s  enough.

A Doll’s House was an adaptation of Ibsen’s play by novellist and trained actor Emily Perkins. Watching it was a Damascus experience. Lightning right in the eye. Why waste my life making up new plots? This way, audiences get to engage with a classic and a new piece of NZ writing AT THE SAME TIME. Everyone wins. Emily* gets to pit her sensibilites against Ibsen, and come out looking very perceptive indeed. The cast get to create a new role and be compared to all the great Noras and Torvalds of history. In Emily’s adaptation, Nora and her husband live in some kind of solar-powered, tank-water-drinking eco-experiment, and I loved how the restrictions of traditional marriage have been replaced by their own eco-nazi bullshit, which Nora buys into for as long as she can. To me the whole thing hinges on one line – “I haven’t been happy, I’ve been cheerful.” Laurel Devenie is a great friend, but I will start a fight with anyone who denies she’s the best stage actor in New Zealand. If you think I’m wrong, bring your arguments or your fists – either way I’ll batter you. The biggest compliment I can pay this show is that it made me want to do a translation right now. Home fucking run. I’ve already got the first act of Our Town down for anyone who wants to see.

I imagine the main point of controversy would have been the set. It’s played in a pit of stuffed panda bears. Why Rabbit, why? Like Daniel, Tony’s never going to give you what you want, but he’s probably going to give you something that’s much better for you. His aluminium ladders for my play On the Upside Down of the World were inspired, and at the time I thought his pit of pandas was treat. An artificial softness that they all roll round in ‘till the shit hits the fan. Then Christian Penny suggested something I thought was intriguing – another option is that the set could have been much warmer. Arguable, I know, and this is not an invitiation for Rabbit to run me over in one of his segways (he’s got the licence to import them into NZ), but I think Christian has an interesting point. As is, the set tells us where we’re going -  recognition of the ultimate coldness of artificial comfort. But we already know the plot of A Doll’s House – we know where Nora’s going to get to. How’s about showing us how a smart, kind woman like her fucked up so badly in the first place? Let’s make that eco-paradise look like the dream that got them into this pickle. Warm, natural acres of green for healthy kids to run around under big skies and clean air. Then, as the play goes on, we, like the charcters come to realise that all that organic environmental paradise is worthless compared to a scrap of true human connection.

Then to Titus. These on-screen shows from NT, Young Vic, Globe and Met etc. are a gamechanger for me. For the first time in my writing life I don’t need to travel to London and sit in the cheapest seat in the house to realise how far my practices are from the best in the world. The best thing I’ve seen all year anywhere in the world is the Young Vic’s A Streetcar Named Desire at the Lighthouse Cuba in Wellington.

Titus reminded me why Shakespeare is the king. His use of audience contrasts wildly with Kitson's. Shakespeare just does it. He doesn’t need to talk about it. One minute the crowd’s a Roman mob, helping give Titus the best entrance ever, through the throng on a slave-borne chariot. A couple of hours later, they’re a gothic army getting ready to rape and pillage themselves from before. This is immersive theatre. And the audience don’t have to do a thing. Being there is enough for them to know they’re important. Also, for the first time in three Tituses, I understood the plot. Man it’s rough. Most Hollywood stories start off with a protagonist who’s lovable and pitiable in the same measure. Something exciting happens to turn his (it’s usually a he) life upside down and he gets to be Spiderman (it’s usually Spiderman). Then, in act three he combines his newfound spider powers with the everyman qualities he had at the start to save the world and fuck the girl. Hooray. Titus is the opposite. He  starts out as a superhero. His loyalty to Rome causes him to turn down the chance to be Emperor in favour of the traditionally rightful heir. From there, his determination to do the proper thing makes his life worse and worse till he’s stabbed his own son to death, seen his daughter raped and mutilated, and chopped off his own hand to save two other sons only to see them beheaded. Understandably he goes a bit crazy. Moral of the story: park where you like.  There’s  no reward for being a good citizen. Thankfully (for the audience) all this denegration leaves you in no doubt that Titus is going to go Rambo-apeshit on the whole damn pack of them.

To say that the third act is a little disappointing seems churlish. Especially when the climax involves him cutting up his enemies, baking them in a pie and feeding them to their evil bitch of a mother. Then he tells her, slams her face in her son pie and stabs her in the neck. It’s not so much what happens that’s a downer, but how. Titus spends most of the play suffering as a tragic character and ultimately vanquishes his foes as a comic one. To offer some dramaturgial advice to Shakespeare: the resolution is a bit shit compared to what’s gone on before. His enemies get caught when they decide for no reason at all to put on masks and appear before him pretending to be ghosts or something. But I forgive Bill everything for the moor, Aaron, who is a better villain than Iago, though not a cleverer one. He wins a tight contest for best murder in the play by sticking a sword up a midwife’s twat. He gets the best exit I’ve ever seen, borne to his awful death begging God to forgive him for any good deed he’s ever done. What I learned from this one is that the key to horror is humour. There’s lots of laughs. It leads to an unsettling effect that benefits both comedy and drama, before, in my indisputable opinon, taking over a bit too much at the end.

So all in all, my first month back has been a thought-provoking return to New Zealand theatre. A lot to like, and a lot to think about. 

* Whenever I'm on a first name basis with someone I'm gonna try and use their first name.  

At long last David Farrier’s *highly* subcribed webcast is to be axed. The only surprise is that it’s taken more than a month for Medianet to get on trend. Despite the predictable (and predicted) flaming, this is not a binary issue. You’re not a 0 or 1 on this. It’s not even close.

Where did it all go wrong for Dave? Let’s start by blocking everyone who's trolling Clone Julie Christie (let’s also delete the squeamishness – she’s EXACTLY the same as Vagina-Born JC, who’s dead, so where’s the possibile confusion? Next Profit & Delight: clone rights). It’s not her fault.

We have to face the data. Internet is a dying platform. The rest of the world is moving inmind. Dave needed to adjust, but he’s part of a millenial web-surfing community that thinks there’s something important about letting subscribers use their eyes and click-follow their curiosity. Todays, if you’re not directly in the demographic’s thoughtstream, you may as well be literature.

Ten million follow Dave on twitter, and he has six million subscribers. From an advertiser’s point of view, those figures are as small as they are intangible. Even if every subscriber was a verified biological consumer, they’d only comprise 10% of NZ’s total demographic. And just because you subscribe to a channel doesn’t mean you process it.  I subscribe to 60.3k+, and only have time to scan two-thirds.

Medianet can’t compete with the online might of iTVNZ, but it can like the updates. Traffic shot off the graph last week when perennial Jack Tame’s sidekick #whatshername went on fertility leave and was replaced by a hovering wig and pair of tits. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but logic needs to raise the child. The Apple simplicity of the solution called into question the purpose of all that money advertisers kickstarted into cloning Jim Hickey from the DNA vault.

While the future was happening, Medianet was market-testing a proposal to replace Vagina-Born Dave with a Clone Dave in his 30s. Critics claimed this was a nostalgia-driven miscalc, but I process it as the first step in a long-term plan spanning at least one month. Medianet wanted to divest themselves of Dave altogether. Either way, all this speculation amounts to checking the findmyiphones on Flight 370. Dave’s career is now in cloud-based storage.

The real blame should be DMd @ Dave's subscribers. For all their well-meaning petitions, most of his demographic consume the majority of their data inmind, and the backlookers view the internet as a neuron-microwave and restrict their offspring’s access to it. Personally I think that amounts to child abuse, but I guess we’ll never know for sure because only Dave would have cared enough about the issue to start a thread on it.

Beyond Dave, this whole feed has nothing to do with an individual webcast and everything to do with a fundamental debate on the internet as a demographic good. Debate's over. It's not.

Colmar Brunton has been in power for three survey cycles. How much longer will we allow them to base their venture capital decisions on blatantly qualitative data? Why are we even discussing demographic funding for web-based content? That's not where the demographic congregates. I have to scan history to find a similar situation. One result. 0.12 seconds.

1.  A generation ago it took nearly two years for Mayor John Campbell (who some might remember started in television) to stop financing costly upgrades to Auckland's waterfront. The only users of this space were the seagulls that shat on it. The only contemporary  trace of Campbell's crusade is the appropriation of the archaic word 'public' to describe the birds that bounce round rubbish bins pecking at chips.  

If you’ve read this far, thank you. I realise my thoughts can seem cold. Know this: I have feelings. I’m aware that Dave and his team of three relied on their share of the ad revenue to provide nutrients to their inner circles. I’m a contemporary of Dave’s. I knew him in the flesh and I followed him from television to online. If anyone should weep for his demise it’s me. I just can’t. I hope that Medianet’s decision affords Dave the freedom to migrate to an inmind format. But something tells me he won’t want to. His working days are done and he caught more attention along the way than most. There's no need to fear. No matter what Dave does from here, we’re going to be OK. Information is like a flower to our demographic bee. If it does whatever flowers do that make them attractive to bees, pollination will occur. My simile falters only for lack of knowledge of bees. What I mean is that if it's really worth knowing that kids in South Bombay are browsing at slower speeds than their parents did at the same age, then someone will link us to that. 

But then again, what would I know? I’m just a brain in a jar.  

An eclipse is rare. So’s a production that leaves me feeling exhilarated and jealous as fuck that I didn’t make it myself. Don Juan, by A Slightly Isolated Dog is both. Now it’s finished. You missed it . 

What’s so good about it? 

1. Everything it is.

2. Everything it isn’t.

3. Everything it portends. 
------

1. Everything it is
It’s a group of people telling a story, in a way that you’ve  never seen before. It will make you wonder why all theatre is not like this. 

There’s not a speck of bullshit in it. The actors are upfront with you. It’s all bullshit. They’re conjuring a world and all the people in it from their bodies, their voices, a few random costumes and props, an awesome soundscape, and most importantly, your imagination, which they’ll fire and nudge in some unexpected directions. If you think that sounds limited, think what a novelist can conjure with 26 letters. You’ll pick up what they’re putting down in a way you’ve never felt it before. Particularly if your experience of on-stage sex is watching actors dry-hump. 

2. Everything it’s not

This is not a prehistoric film made by people too poor to hire a camera. This is not a bunch of people pretending to talk in fake rooms. They don’t pretend they’re not pretending. In fact, they speak in shitty French accents so there’s no doubt they’re acting. They know we’re watching them, and it’s important to the story that we are. A film plays the same whether we’re there or not. This experience wouldn’t happen like it does if not for you, specifically,being there to watch it. There is a protagonist in this play – Don Juan, but he’s not portrayed by a single actor. He’s played by a baseball cap and a speaker-box that float around the theatre, landing on the head and hand of the person best placed to embody DJ at that particular moment. The person ‘playing’ DJ is further denied the responsibility and prestige of stardom because DJ’s dialogue is done by someone else speaking into a microphone. DJ’s voice emerges from the speaker-box while DJ of the moment mouths along. For settings and props, the company doesn’t try to depict ‘what it is’ so much as ‘what it’s like.’ A spooky forest is created by members of the audience holding spokey umbrellas. A gunshot is a popping balloon. They not trying to fool us, they’re trying to conjure images in our minds because they know this will be far more evocative than anything they could try to manifest as a set, character or prop.

3. Everything it portends. 

Fuck-all people saw Don Juan, but I’m still confident that Circa made a great decision to program it. The work is good, people will take time to catch on.  Luckily, all DJ needs is a space and a crowd. It challenges the rest of us making shows to think again. Theatre doesn’t have a fraction of the spatial requirements most bands do, but we’re still suffering the hangover from the heavy stage machinery of the Victorian era. We tend to act as if we’ve got more requirements around our choice of location than a restaurant.

Don Juan could be at a music festival near you, playing at the back of a mosh pit, it could be in the middle of a square in the middle of summer, or it could be in the foyer of a beautifully designed office building on a Friday evening so workers and passers-by can have a beer planted in their hands and a story planted in their minds. Don Jon should be coming to you. You can’t not enjoy it. But I can completely understand your reluctance to pay for it. Or go out of your way to see it. 

With this in mind, I’m rethinking my relationship to the term ‘amateur’. It’s got dirty associations in the professional era, but when you think about it, it perfectly describes the activities and rewards of most bands, athletes, start-ups, audiences  and businesses. Maybe it’s time for me as a maker to stop starting with the paycheck. Wayne’s World says ‘build it and they will come.’ We behave like ‘it’ means bricks and mortar, but what if it’s a community? What if we burned the old school to the ground and started from scratch, and built a new community around what theatre could be, not what it has been for the last hundred years. That’d be Don Juan’s greatest conquest. He would have torn us a whole new mouth. He would be the eclipse that killed the dinosaurs.

Credits

Tradition requires that Leo Gene Peters, Susie Bert, Andrew Paterson, Maaka Pohatu, Jonothan Price, Comfrey Sanders, Meg Rollandi, Matt Eller, Teresa Micheletti, Hayley Prooull, Susannah Donovan, Sacha Tilly receive credit for their individual contributions. But to be honest it’s what they’ve managed to achieve as a group, as A Slightly Isolated Dog that deserves the praise. 

I’m off to Dunedin in a couple of weeks to be part of the New Zealand Young Writers festival. I’ll be performing OCPHCTMHYL at the Fortune, and leading a workshop on, quote, anything you like, end quote.  

The invite/ challenge came from my good friend and festival organiser Councillor Aaron Hawkins, so I couldn’t wriggle out of it. Not after drinking all that booze at his wedding. Not after presenting him with a voucher for an albatross colony in lieu of a wedding gift.  

But what the hell can I teach anyone? I can barely write myself. I’ve never had a problem coming up with ideas, but it’s the growing them that’s tough. My brain is a lawn and every blade of grass is an idea. The problem is there’s only a few green patches and the rest of it looks like it’s been hosed with dog piss. My focus these days is figuring out how to get the best out of my metaphorical lawn.

So for my workshop, on Friday 5th June, I’m asking you to bring along a good idea you’ve had that’s never quite worked out. I’m going to try and share a few tricks that have helped me reconnect with an idea’s inner awesomeness. 

The first thing I have to unravel when things get tangled up is what the heart of my idea actually is. I’ve got some tricks for that which I stole from one of those couples weekends where you learn to reconnect with what made you fall in love in the first place. 

The next most important thing for me to figure out is what my actual connection with this awesome idea is. A few years ago I got laughed off a marae. They’d put out an open call for ideas for Maori screen content. I pitched them a kind of Maori Game of Thrones set in pre-contact times (working title: Blood Moko). You can see it now, right? Te Rauparaha, gods, taiaha, despatching your enemies with a patu then eating them and making love to their magical wahine. All in Te Reo with subtitles. Great idea. These days it’s called Deadlands - and it’s a brilliant film by Toa Fraser.* 

At first, when Blood Moko got rejected, I thought it was because all those people judging me were short-sighted idiots who didn’t know the commercial potential and entertainment value inherent in their culture. Now I realise they weren’t laughing at my idea. They were laughing at me. Of course it was a great idea, but what was my connection to it? I’m a mono-lingual Pakeha who enjoys watching fights from my couch.

I’m not saying you can only write what you know.  Anthony McCarten, the New Zealand screenwriter who wrote The Theory of Everything says ‘write what you’re interested in’. But interest isn’t a passive ‘I’ll wikipedia it’ kind of interest. It’s an active interest in something you’re so fascinated by you’re prepared to delve into. If I was really interested in Blood Moko, I would have learned Te Reo, read up on pre-colonial history and taken a course in Mau Rakau to connect more deeply with my interest. Then I might have written Deadlands instead of just enjoying it. 

This last thing I’ll be encouraging people to discover in their idea is how it changes us. The oldest rule in the story book says that stories are made of three parts, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. You start one way, you get thrown into opposite world, and then you create a new version of yourself based on a combination of who you were and what you learned. I’d argue that this form is a universal in Western storytelling - no matter whether you’re making theatre, music or news. Off the top of my head - The Kink’s Lola: 

(thesis)            A regular guy meets a beautiful woman 
(antithesis)     He finds out she’s a man.
(synthesis)      He accepts that it’s a mad world, where a regular heterosexual can still be attracted to a she-male. 

Most news stories are built around this format too:  

(Thesis)           It was a quiet town, until  - 
(Antithesis)    Something extraordinary happened - insert murder, disaster etc. 
(Synthesis)     Now the victims must figure out how to live, having been left the same but changed. 

So, this workshop is gonna be great. You’ll love it. I initially called it Re-Wrighting, cos, you know, the wanker in me likes to think of writing as a craft, like ship-wrighting or whatever. But then I took a look at the programme. All the other events have  exciting titles like Guy Williams: Ask Me Anything, and Teeny Weeney Ziney Theengy. Compared to that, my event sounds like something for people who wear incontinence pads. At a Young Writers’ Festival! Fuck. 

Therefore, in the spirit of my workshop, I’m re-working the title. What I’m really interested in is helping people get the best out of their ideas. I’m connected to this because I’m desperately trying to figure out ways to get the best out of my own. And how does it change you? Come to my event and your idea will start with a dad bod, swing some tin, and leave shredded.  

New working title: All Killer, No Filler. 

Can’t wait to see you there. 
P.S. I’ll also be performing On the Conditions and Possibilities of Hillary Clinton Taking Me as Her Young Lover at the Fortune Theatre. Friday 5 June, 7.30 pm – 8.30 pm

All events are free, but you need to book. Check out  www.youngwritersfest.nz

P.P.S. I’ve copy and pasted Aaron’s programme blurb cos it’s better than anything I’ve written. 
Direct from New York City, where New York Magazine called it ‘brilliant and lowbrow’, Arthur Meek is Richard Meros in a Stateside rework of the infamous Nuclear PowerPoint presentation On The Conditions & Possibilities Of Helen Clark Taking Me As Her Young Lover. His strike rate is 0/1 so far – can he help carry home the Hillary 2016 Campaign and upgrade that to a C- ?

* I’m in no way suggesting Deadlands stole my idea. Just that it was a good  idea that I had too. Like World Peace. 

I like to use words I don’t understand. I’ve just discovered that the latest addition to this lexicon is ‘utopian.’ I employ it to describe a more perfect vision of the society in which we currently exist, but after reading the book by Thomas More that introduced us to the term, I’ve been forced to fire it for faking its resume.

499 years ago, More decided that there was something a bit off about the world around him. He lived in a society in which “aristocrats, goldsmiths and money lenders… are rewarded for their laziness or their unnecessary activities by a splended life of luxury.” At the other end of the scale, “labourers, coachmen carpenters and farmhands who never stop working like carthorses” for the good of society can expect to enjoy scorn, poverty and neglect from cradle to grave.

So far, so relatable. But it’s when you get to grips with what More thinks would be an improvement that the eyes start to bulge.

Utopia is an island nation, founded by a benevolent dictator. Everyone is completely content with their lives and their lot, which is lucky, considering how many of them are slaves. Voluntary slavery is, in fact, the only possible way of immigrating to Utopia, though there are ample opportunites to wind up in involuntary bondage. There’s no personal property, but thanks to a strong underlying work ethic and mandatory belief in the posthumous transition of the soul to heaven/hell, everyone happily produces everything anyone needs and gives it to them free. It helps that no one’s hung up on clothes – they all have one set of the same uniform, and they’re content to live in communal dorms in small hamlets that they’re discouraged from leaving. You can expect to live to a ripe old age in Utopia, until such time as your life is deemed unsatisfactory, at which point the authorities will counsel you to euthenise yourself through starvation.

Utopia is a man’s world. You get to boss your wife and kids about, and when it comes to matrimony you know exactly what you’re in for, thanks to a cunning system where the prospective bride is exhibited stark naked to the prospective bridesgroom. After all, “when you’re buying a horse” you make a thorough examination of the beast, whereas “with a bride you don’t even bother to take it out of its wrappings. You judge the whole woman from a few square inches of face.”

The benefit of this arrangement for the successful bride is that once a man has made his choice “if she turns ugly after the wedding he must just resign himself to his fate.”

There are many other delightful habits and beliefs that solve social problems recognisable to our own time through the creation of appalling alternatives that leave you yearning for the corruption, inequity and over-optimism that got us here in the first place.

From a writer’s point of view it’s sobering to reflect that any endeavour to imagine a world set up for the better seems doomed through prejudice and myopicness to make a roundabout case for the status quo, while the dystopian fantasties of 1984, Brave New World and The Hunger Games suggest that if we stay on the path we’re on we’re fucked. So all road lead to hell. If that’s the case, I’m left a little bit bemused as to who has the ability to help define improvement and foster change. 

By here, of course, I mean the New York Magazine Approval Matrix. For those of you out of state it's the kind of place that is traditionally used to announce the arrival of an even better-tasting Ramen, but for today, they've slurped On the Conditions and Possibilities of Hillary Clinton Taking Me as Her Young Lover. It seems that we are low-brow and brilliant, just like Lena Dunham and that crazy Jinx fellow who killed all those people.  Well, I can't say it's not an honour. Though I do have to point out that it's not 'my' show. Not mine singular, anyway. This is the brainchild of me and my co-adaptor and canny director Geoff Pinfield, and of course it is based on a book with a similar, but slightly different title by the mighty Richard Meros. What is clear is that like two-minute noodles drowned in boiled pork bones, we have something that Americans find tasty and are willing to spend far too much money on. So thanks, America, and thanks Sam Trubridge, David Goldthorpe and the brains behind the New Zealand New Performance Festival in New York that brought shows like mine, and several other great ones to La Mama Experimental Theatre basically under their own steam (and with the help of Boosted supporters and a little bit of CNZ, though not for me, and not enough to call this a government sanctioned/encouraged trip.) This is punk, people.

 I’ve become so habituated to seeing my fellow artists mocked for saying nothing that it’s almost refreshing to hear work criticised for saying TOO MUCH. 

To summarise the reaction to Jono Rotman’s[1] latest exhibition: It features photographs in general, and one in particular, that are not proper subjects for art. The fact that such subjects even exist in modern New Zealand is a national disgrace, and we shouldn’t be advertising the fact much less celebrating it on gallery walls. Besides, gang members have plenty of people lining up to take snaps of them. Namely police photographers.

To extrapolate the argument, Rotman’s subjects are best treated like the old, mad, poor, dying, sick, and ugly  - i.e. forgotten about altogether.

As an artist, it’s common to the point of inevitability to be criticised for not capturing the full picture in your work. A piece of art that depicts the world as it is necessarily fails to depict the world as it could or should be. An idealistic depiction, on the other hand, is by definition out of sync with reality. To depict a subject at all is to declare it worthy of special attention, thus briefly depriving non- doppelgangers of the apple of affirmation.

As to the question of the subjects’ suitability. To contextualise this we could go back in time to Paris, 1865, when that dirty old bastard Édouard Manet had the temerity to paint an actual prostitute, as an actual prostitute, actually looking at the viewer. Olympia, bitch, avert your eyes!  Nor do you have to go to the Gow Langsford gallery to see alleged murderers staring back at you from the wall. Pop over to Texas and you’ll find George W Bush exhibiting a portrait of his mate Tony Blair.

Before dismissing Rotman’s work as easy, derivative, sensationalist, inappropriate or whatever else, I’d like to invite you, for a moment, to put yourself in the artist’s shoes. Imagine popping along to your neighbourhood chapter of the Mongrel Mob. Then try knocking on the door and asking if you can take a few pictures of them. Then once you’ve talked them into it, (and I’d imagine your common-or-garden gang member would expect to hear some more high-minded artistic motivations than the ones I’ve heard publicly attributed to Rotman) go and find yourself a dealer who you can convince to exhibit them on the basis that someone in their right mind might like to purchase one.

In taking these photos it seems Rotman may have unwittingly captured another portrait altogether - that of majority New Zealand, perhaps even the majority of the world - a brooding, mean-spirited, defensive, verbally violent creature that likes its art like its porridge. Not too hot, not too cold, and preferably not at all.

ADDENDUM – In Defence of Artists Past.

Up there’s my blog, I like to keep ‘em short, but here’s some more if you’re interested. It’s about my other besieged artist friend C. F. Goldie[2].

Given the amount of creating andl dying that artists do, the cumbersome job of interpreting the stuff they’ve made usually gets subcontracted to commentators. Enter, stage left (the ‘sinister’ entrance, as it used to be called), Dr. Paul Moon, a professional, professorial historian who gets paid a salary to think about this stuff, and illuminate the path that leads us from the cockpit of our ignorance to our nearest emergency exit. Or not, depending on his mood.

In describing Rotman’s work as derivative of C. F. Goldie, and others, Moon argues that if you’ve seen one tattooed Maori, you’ve seen them all. Despite the fact that these artists work more than a century apart, depict subjects at the opposite end of numerous social spectra[3], and basically couldn’t be more freaking different. He goes on to dismiss Goldie’s entire oeuvre as some kind of thirty-year meditation on Dr. Isaac Featherston’s contention that all we can do for Maori is to ‘smooth down their dying pillow.’ Finally he both chomps cake and has it remain magically uneaten by dismissing Rotman’s work as both unashamed exoticism, and a shameful generalization of all Maori, then biffs Goldie in the same boat and sets them both adrift.

You’d expect Moon to provide a little context around these extraordinary statements and in doing so, you’d be expecting too much. I’ve mounted my defence of Jono up above, and I also absolve him of Moon’s other charges, which I throw out of court primarily for their ‘obvious to those with eyes’ absurdity. How can one thing simultaneously be damned as representative and completely unrepresentative of the same people? How can a photographer of fringe social outcasts be derivative of a painter of elder statespersons?  But the dead have none to speak for them, except professional historians like Moon, and I have to say that if Goldie was a dog, and Moon its owner, then based on published comments, the SPCA would be getting involved. So, where he baldly does not go, I will.

Goldie was born in Auckland in 1870. By the time he had grown up and started painting, New Zealand had ramped up it’s accidental (illness) and intentional (war) extermination of Maori to the point where the population had fallen from an estimated 100,000 at the time of Cook’s arrival to around 42,000 in 1896. If you were concerned about the eradication of poverty, and you were able to point to a 60% decline over the course of a century, you’d think you were on the right track.  Similarly, given the stats in Victorian New Zealand, you’d probably feel as confident in your assessment of what the future held for Maori as we feel about who’s going to win the next rugby world cup. Nothing’s certain, of course, in life or in extinction, but you’ve got your well-founded suspicions. None of this is to say (which it often tacitly seems to do) that Goldie himself was welcoming of the demise of  a people[4], or actively involved in making it happen.

The next overly simplistic notion is that Goldie was a patronising colonial who hated on Maori and expressed these feelings by painting them as old, sad, sleepy and puffing away on the smokes. A more sophisticated reading ought to mention that the age of the subjects was at least partially because Goldie was trying to paint persons of a certain social standing (which it took them time to achieve) and more importantly, that the Ta Moko they sported were created through the increasingly rare practice of carving permanent trenches into the skin. The people who still had this type of tattoo were generally old. 

Also, you’d do well to remember that somber as most of Goldie’s subjects look, neither the portraiture nor photography of the time featured much in the way of grinning selfies.

My point is that if you do what Moon has done, and place certain half-cocked facts in a certain half-cocked order and view them in a particular half-cocked light, you can easily paint Goldie, or just about anyone as a real arsehole. I sincerely hope I haven’t done the same to Moon.

[1] Disclosure. I know Jono, I like him, but sometimes the coffee he brews is a bit strong.

[2] Disclosure. I don’t know Goldie, and cannot even begin to imagine what his coffee tasted like.

[3] Or spectrums?

[4] Or genocide?

Recidivists among you will have noticed that nothing has cropped up since mid-December. I hope this doesn’t make you upset, but at the same time it would be flattering if it did.  I’ve set aside Profit & Delight to indulge what might be the most productive spurt of writing I’ve ever experienced. I’m tucked up in the Writer’s Room in New York, a shared writing space in which writing is conducted at any time of the day or night in a monastic, and quickly blissful silence. Since arriving at the start of the year I’ve slapped out drafts of a new play, a television pilot, and one and a half screenplays. I’ve got a few more things to get onto the page and I look forward to sharing the results with you soon. I’ll return to the blog with vigour as soon as I’ve got buckets under all the drips.

 

In the last issue, I questioned the ability of American theatre-makers to make a significant impact on their culture. The US operates on such a large scale that amplification has become the most basic ingredient for creating a national conversation, and theatre has always struggled to broadcast beyond a few dozen rows at a time.

I footnoted my way out of tarring kiwi theatre with the same brush, and here’s why. In our environment, the national conversation is more easily had face-to-face, and that makes theatre the ideal medium for us to talk to and about ourselves.

Screen is expensive and competitive. When we make shows and movies, we have to place them shoulder to shoulder with the latest and greatest from around the world, and it’s priced exactly the same. This makes things tough for everyone. It’s difficult enough for makers to get their ideas onscreen in the first place,[1] and that’s before you try to leap the biggest hurdle of all:  encouraging audiences to choose the local option. A story told to an empty cinema begs the same question as the unheard tree keeling over in the forest.

Our geographical isolation makes us about as appealing to foreign theatre companies as we are to foreign boat people. This makes theatre a monopoly industry. What other product can enjoy such luck? The audience gets a choice of company and venue, but whichever way the cookie crumbles they are most likely to see local content or local assembly of foreign material.  Every couple of years two of our major cities host international arts festivals, and a few overseas acts are included in regional festivals, but imported content is still the exception rather than the rule. This means that theatre has a much wider scope to talk to New Zealand audiences in general, and in particular audiences that are a bit more specific than the broad stroke 18-49 demographic necessary to get advertisers and producers excited.

This all works out even better if you, like me, believe that wider broadcast of our in-house conversations ain't such a great idea.

Most of the things we want and need to talk about as a nation aren’t appropriate for overseas ears.  Few begrudge an opportunity ‘to put New Zealand on the map,’ but only in a nice way. We want people to think we’re clean, and green and a lovely place to raise cows. In fact, everything we want the world to know or think about New Zealand can and does fit on an advertising billboard. The last thing we want to start talking about with overseas people is our growing inequality, rocky race relations, the disproportionate rates of the violent and unmentionable, or even the things we like to do for fun[3]. But we kind of do need to talk about it. Like the cow runoff that plagues our water table, it may be best to keep this shit on the down low till we’ve come up with an answer that's compatible with the national PR. The best place to get that shit together may be the theatre.

[1] As it is anywhere.

[2] They just don’t get the fun stuff either. c.f bullrush. 

"This play/ is the image of a murder done in Vienna: Gonzago is
the duke's name; his wife, Baptista: you shall see
anon; 'tis a knavish piece of work: but what o'
that? Your majesty and we that have free souls, it
touches us not.”
Hamlet Act III Scene 2.

It does wonders for the soul to believe that you contribute in a positive way to society. No matter how confident you are in this belief, however, it is inadvisable to invite a Nobel Prize-winning economist to quantify your contribution to your face. I’m still in recovery mode from the Public Theatre’s ill-considered decision to ask Joseph Stiglitz to lead a discussion about income inequality and what the artistic community, and in particular theatre makers, can do about it[1].

Stigliz is more conciliatory in person than in print. He gently um-ed and ah-ed his way through a précis of his work and achievements, salting the discussion with the titles and plots of some theatre he’d liked,[2] but his efforts to be nice were undercut by the awful truth: theatre’s recent contribution to changing or advancing the perception of anything on a macro scale in America appears to be limited, to say the most.

The one example Stiglitz had come across that could correlate the arts with positive social change was heartening.  The slow and relatively recent rollout of electricity to certain villages in India has allowed economists, or scientists or advertisers or whoever it is that actually tracks this kind of thing to find a measurable and positive change in gender relations brought about by the introduction of… television. Yes it turns out that the oft-scoffed idiot-box, in association with the perennially poo-pooed[3] style of soap opera, have presented the country ladies with a glimpse of how their big city sisters are treated by their menfolk. This encourages them to demand, and get, a better deal. If religion is the opiate of the masses, then maybe TV is the meth - modern, just as addictive and more stimulating. 

Stiglitz then entered into a conversation with Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis, Public Works Director Lear deBessonet and, awesomely, Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC. The first two did their best to rise to the challenges imposed by the subject, but talk of theatre being a democratic medium is rendered absurd the moment you try to imagine a democracy that makes voting as difficult and expensive as seeing or participating in theatre.      

deBessonet has helmed some positive and large-scale community theatre projects, and if the premise of the discussion was not so lofty everyone might have been happy to accept that theatre can be sweet and harmless and entertaining and thought-provoking and memorable.

McDaniels was by far the most engaged of the speakers, and made a strong argument that the power of Run-DMC’s music stemmed from its ability to literally describe how people were living in his community and what their hopes and hinderances were. Viewed in this context, the Public’s penchant for re-staging  Shakespeare and Brecht seems to have less in common with DMC's mode of influence than it does with fiddling and burning. 

My opinion is that to make any headway in this kind of discussion, theatre needs to stop shouldering the burden of what it can’t do - which is offer access to absolutely everyone, or broadcast as far and wide as most other art forms, and get clever about recognising the nature of its actual strengths. Then it can begin to fuck with people. What theatre in America[4] can and does do is speak directly to a concentrated, powerful and captive audience. These people may not currently visit the theatre for the purpose of changing their lives or the lives of others, but nor do many people nip down dark allies for the purpose of getting mugged; doesn't mean it can't happen. Instead of jumping these vulnerable spheres of hemmed-in influence, theatre wastes much of its time ruing its demographic, and trying to change its nature by constantly striving to make work to appeal to people who aren’t there, and don't want to come, rather than trying to influence those that are, and do.   

Bruce Norris of Clybourne Park and Domesticated is the only playwright I’ve heard acknowledge and appreciate the nature of the people he’s talking to: wealthy, white and on the other side of middle-age. In an environment that relies utterly on patronage, it requires a bold mouth to direct the hand that feeds it, but if the motivation and skill is ever there, so is the audience. Not that any of this is news. It was Hamlet that first popularised the notion that a play could be the thing to catch the conscience of them on high. 

Notes:

[1] Short answer: Get a proper job.

[2] Urinetown made the cut, cos it lampoons privatisation of services. And so did Mike Daisey’s The Agony & Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which JS liked cos it ‘humanised’  Chinese manufacturing practices to American audiences… albeit by lying about them so they better resembled American audience’s preconceived notions about those practices. I could go on about this and I have (see truth and lies, right).

[3] Only ever fobbed off by the great washed, of course. Not by the enormous numbers of people who tune in every night... which is of course, what gives it its ability to affect change on a grand scale.

[4] This is a qualifier that I’ve added to leave the door open for me to discuss some potentially interesting differences apropos theatre in NZ.

“One voice can change a room, and if one voice can change a room, then it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it change a state, it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change the world. Your voice can change the world.”

Barack Obama. 

I’m a reader. I read for pleasure, for money and sometimes out of pure nosiness. It’s the snooping instinct that’s got me involved with a company with a reputation for finding and developing some of the more interesting and acclaimed new plays in America. 

The programme I’m engaged with is responsible for reading hundreds of play submissions and whittling them down to a small handful that are then read aloud for the consideration of an interested public. 

To make the process is as fair as possible, the readers consider the plays in light of specific and well-defined criteria. The criterion that interests me the most is that the play expresses a new, vital or unheard ‘voice’.  

What ‘voice’ means is a bit like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” threshold for obscenity, but one of the obfuscating factors may be the word itself.  Voice suggests a sound that emanates from an individual, but the plays that get me and my fellow readers most excited do so not because they tell a story that is unique and interior but because they seem to perfectly capture the sound, feeling and concerns of a specific community. Often what we describe as a ‘new voice’  will actually be a writer who has managed to galvanise into a community groups or people we have either not heard about, or not recognised as a coherent or interesting bunch of people before. 

Running interference with this hunger for insights into groups of people is a prevailing wisdom that each of us is best placed to ‘speak for ourselves’ and that it’s incautious and inappropriate to speak on behalf of others. The classic example of this is the ongoing argument about whether male writers have a right to depict female characters or authors from one race to describe characters from another. The discussion is academic, and because of this most aspiring writers are exposed to it at length within the college and post-graduate institutions that have become a right of passage. The breezily touted antidote is the invocation for aspiring artists to seek refuge in themselves; to find out who they are, and speak to that, and pretty soon the word ‘voice’ gets brought up, usually preceded by ‘your’. I’d be telling people to examine what communities they are a part of, and encouraging them to try to understand and express those. 

So to quibble with Barak, one voice can’t change a room, so much as galvanise it to a shared cause.  Martin Luther King Jr epitomises this in his “I have a dream” motif. I had a dream last night in which I got upset about spilling melted ice-cream on a hamburger that I didn’t even want. MLK’s dream will live longer in the popular consciousness not because it was idiosyncratic, but because the voice he was speaking in, like the dream he described, was a collective one.  

“Song-weaving Goddess, speak the memory
Of that man: the waymaker of words and deeds,
The wanderer, harrowed through the world and the years,
After sacking the sacred stronghold of Troy.”

Homer. The Odyssey. Translation by A Z Foreman. 

It’s hard not to think fondly of an age that believed creativity emanated from nine beautiful women, all of whom could be charmed into putting out for a few kind words and libations of milk, honey and water. Given that projects completed under their guidance stand tall among the most influential and admired artworks of any place or time, we may describe these ladies as good bang for the oblation. 

In the successive deicides of latter days,  it became customary for the victor to shoulder the burden of office surrendered by the vanquished, on the understanding that policy can change. Meteorology declared the cause of thunderbolts to be atmospheric pressures, rather than human sin, and suspended the necessity for all weather-appeasing sacrifices until the emergence of climate change.  Most godly portfolios were picked up by the human manifestations of medicine, economics and politics, but creativity remains mysteriously administered from behind a closed door, left to its own devices on account of its extraordinary output and the inability of pretenders to the task.

Of course, there are all sorts of people and disciplines devoted to identifying and systemising creativity, but I can assure you that for all the diverting books and theories,  the only thing anyone has managed to come up with is a subtle variation of ‘it sometimes emerges from long hours spent trying hard.’ This conclusion is at once accurate, incomplete and extraordinarily silly; analogous to stating that you can harness fire by rushing to the termination of a flash of lightning, or by rubbing two sticks.

The ‘hard work’ motto cunningly manages to both answer and avoid the questions ‘what is creativity’ and ‘where does it come from?’ The word ‘inspiration’ suggests the ingestion of something external, while ‘expression’ hints at something coughed up from within. Just like breathing, or our personalities, I assume creativity is a combination of both, and so do many people, but that doesn’t leave us any closer to launching the equivalent of a Zippo.

So those of us seeking to manifest creativity on this earthly plane are left with exhortations to work harder and longer.  Personally I enjoy feeling the crack of the whip, be it from an expectant client or employer or a contracted deadline. I have in my voluntary servitude been known to easily mow through fourteen hour days denying myself the pleasures of lunch and the necessities of bathroom breaks.  This however, is the systemisation of productivity, and productivity is is a party to which creativity, when invited,  may or may not decide to attend.

After more serious deliberation than you might imagine, I have settled on a version of Pascal’s wager.  I figure it can’t hurt, and may prove quite enjoyable, to wander down to Central Park and find a pleasant spot on which to make a puddle of milk, honey and water while invoking the names Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, and Urania, and, just to be sure, to offer my respects to the three original muses Aoide, Melete and Mneme: song, practice and memory. 

“What is wise to know/ is the gods by their names…
It pays to let ‘em know you know who they are.[1]”

Sam Hunt




[1] Due to the sex and number of gods I’m talking about I’ve had to really butcher and amputate the last part of this quote from the beautiful poem/song Cape Turnagain feat. Sam Hunt by The Warratahs. If you’d like to make me feel better you could listen to it properly by yourself.

Harlem hospital is three blocks from my house. For me, it’s a three minute walk, but for a disconcerting number of the locals it’s a much more arduous hop, limp or roll. In this neighbourhood, the average number of limbs per resident is significantly less than four. Last-resort amputation is the first and only resort for all but the best insured. The resultant street scenes seem to owe apologies to Hieronymus Bosch. I have to weave through this throng en route to Bank of America, the custodians of my wealth and the beneficiary of significant and ongoing public bailouts since it fell foul of an arguably unlucky bout of financial illness based on poorly considered loans that it surely wouldn’t have offered under the influence of rude business health.  

Taken as a whole, the effect makes me feel akin to Higgs, the protagonist of Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, who finds himself in a topsy-turvy world where illness is considered a crime and crime an illness.

Many of the physically and economically debilitating personal amputations could be prevented if medical intervention was available at an earlier stage, or if prescription medication was priced at a level commensurate with personal incomes, or if the price of the worst food wasn’t held artificially low via subsidy payments to farmers, or for any other reason that would make perfect sense in a different world. Instead, I doubt many local eyebrows would be raised at the judgment imposed by the Erewhonian court on defendant who was sentenced to hard labour for contracting pleurisy. The judge refused to contemplate leniency in light of  the defendant’s poor living conditions and family history of illness. His logic was that by setting such a precedent, he would be encouraging the illegal actions of others. 

In contrast, Erewhonians consider crime to be a temporary malady that afflicts one through no fault of one’s own and is to be managed and ultimately cured through public relief. Higgs finds accommodation and friendship with  Senoj Nosnibor, a wealthy merchant who has the community’s sympathy and well-wishes as he recovers from a recent bout of fraud. He’s doing much better, but still has the financial equivalent of the odd sniffle.

In the USA, sickness is a personal responsibility, while business crime constitutes a public concern. Individuals can mitigate the worst consequences of ill-health through personal insurance, which runs at about US$400 a month for the cheapest policy, calculated on the understanding that you have no preexisting conditions. If anything has previously gone wrong with your body, then the financial sky is the limit of what you pay, and the actions of Walter White in Breaking Bad begin to provide inspiration rather than entertainment. Business, on the other hand, can conduct any transaction that takes its fancy on the understanding that if anything goes awry, the government will intervene to remedy the losses. 

 The basis of Erewhonian philosophy is that children choose to be born, therefore any bad things that happen to them are their own fault.  The message emanating from this shining city is that truth and fiction are strangers no more.