Skin Tight ~ a theatre review

 

‘Skin Tight’

By Gary Henderson

Produced by Charlatan Clinic presents

Directed by Melissa Fergusson

Musgrove Studio at the Maidment Theatre, Auckland

Wednesday 22 June 2011

Contains nudity and sexual content

Running time: 1 hour, no interval

Published on Theatreview

‘When Tom and Elizabeth took the farm
The bracken made their bed … ‘

So begins Denis Glover’s iconic New Zealand poem ‘The Magpies’, that economic, mono-syllabic paean to life in an idyllic, sun-drenched, post-war South Canterbury. Glover, probably best remembered for his prodigious appetite for alcohol, ranks among New Zealand’s best poets of the period. He, better even than his contemporaries Baxter, Louis Johnson, Kendrick Smithyman, RAK Mason and ARD Fairburn, captures that angular awkwardness of the ’50’s, a time when men resolutely veiled the torment of war and women toiled the land.

‘The Magpies’ tells the story of Tom and Elizabeth from marital bliss to death and madness, a transitory tale of love and beauty, pitiless bankers, an unforgiving land and all of this to the quavering accompaniment of the magpies trill ~ ‘and quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle, the magpies said.’

Gary Henderson’s play takes us on the same journey without fear or favour, true to Glover’s vision but with more than a smidgen of the playwright’s excellent fancy. Henderson has a body of work that makes him unquestionably one of our worthiest, most serious and most successful writers for the theatre. Like Glover, his work has a firebrand quality and, again, like Glover he doesn’t ever say anything that doesn’t need to be said.  ‘Skin Tight’ is one hour long and takes all the breath it needs to live its life and pass on. In lesser hands it might well have run to five acts (with intervals).

‘Skin Tight’, along with ‘Sunset Café’, Homeland’ and’ ‘An Unseasonable Fall of Snow’, all demonstrate Henderson’s astonishing ear for dialogue and the Kiwi vernacular as well as a fine understanding of narrative. If the success of a text can be measured by the regularity with which it is performed then ‘Skin Tight’ confirms Henderson as one of our very best.

In Melissa Fergusson’s excellent production we get a new look at this fine play and it’s absolutely riveting stuff as much for its fresh, naturalistic approach as for its loyalty to the text.

No amount of research can replace being there and, as someone who grew up in the sweltering summers of Canterbury, at Mesopotamia, Hororata, Allenton and Orari, who went to school with Glover’s son and met the man himself, who lived with a father deeply damaged by the war and a stoic mother who sewed, baked and made good with what she had on a war pension, I was frankly flabbergasted, first at Henderson’s most accurate rendering of the period and, second, at Fergusson’s exquisite recreation of the tensions, sexual and otherwise, that underscored those discontented times.

It’s probably no coincidence that next on Auckland Theatre Company’s Maidment horizon is the September production of Bruce Mason’s ‘End of the Golden Weather’ as adapted by Murray Lynch. It’s back to the ‘50s big time and, while Fergusson, Glover and Henderson share their tale of mortgagee sales, financial hardship and loss in a South Canterbury context in the 1950’s, there’s an eerie contemporary familiarity that some won’t want to think too much about as the secret door to Mother Hubbard’s South Canterbury cupboard is laid equally bare a mere 60 years later.

It has to be said that any new production of ‘Skin Tight’ will be compared with Gary Henderson’s original 1994 production starring (and I use that word selectively) Larissa Matheson and Jed Brophy, or Cathy Downes 1998 recreation, again with Matheson and Brophy, this time in the studio at the Court Theatre prior to an international tour which culminated in a prestigious ‘Fringe First’ award at the Edinburgh Festival later that year.

Other notable productions have included Brophy’s Auckland version in 1999 with Ian Hughes as Tom and Claire Waldon as Elizabeth, along with Miranda Harcourt’s revisiting of the work at Downstage in 2004, again with Brophy but with Danielle Cormack as Elizabeth. Each was received warmly by critics in New Zealand whereas overseas productions have been somewhat less cordially greeted with some critics seemingly confused by the content of the piece and others bemused by the physical nature of the work. Suffice to say that, like ‘Foreskin’s Lament’ and the Mason plays, ‘Skin Tight’ speaks powerfully to New Zealanders most of whom have grown up with the sound of quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle etched deep into their psyches.

I’m sure it helps.

Fergusson’s production stands alone among equals, owing little to its predecessors. Like Fergusson herself, the production has a survivalist tang to it, a tautness that is at once challenging and evasive. Like Fergusson, the production takes a full-frontal approach to all the challenges – and there are many – and nails almost all of them, building inexorably to the climax that Henderson has cleverly heralded very early on and that ultimately affects us deeply. There is, after all, no escaping death and the ritualizing of Elizabeth’s passing is genuinely moving and made far more important in this production than the future of the farm and Tom’s own looming madness. No Glover-like cynicism here as the love that endures beyond Elizabeth’s demise consumes us in the moment of her sacramental death.

The Musgrove Studio has long been my favourite boutique theatre venue. The width and depth of the performance space allows for versatile use and the intimacy of the raked auditorium is perfect for this work. Henderson’s simple set requirements – a tin bath, a couple of galvanized buckets, ample water and a floor of tumbling mats – are adequately provided and used largely as scripted. Lighting is effective (Andrew Potvin) and the sound design (Howard DK Jang) is also suited to the work with a short prelude of insistent drumming tuning our heartbeat to what’s to come. There are stylized summer sounds like those evoked in the work and no more is necessary.

The play starts with a stylized fight, one part anger, two parts lust, a sprinkling of choreographed indecision and a final splendid measure of unprovoked passion. Elizabeth (Julia Croft) is summer-dressed in a simple spaghetti-strapped, button-up-the-front white cotton frock of timeless vintage which allows for maximum freedom of movement. Tom (Chris Neels) is farm attired in herringbone twill pants with braces and a classic white singlet. Both are unshod. Henderson requires the body beautiful and these actors are more than adequate to all physical requirements.

Henderson also requires his actors to fight, to kiss and to simulate sexual intimacy, to express a physical lust for each other that may (or may not) cause the audience more than a moment or two of discomfort and possibly even anxiety. These actors are equal to this challenge too, in fact the physicality and commitment throughout is totally laudable. Laudable, and so subtly handled by Fergusson and her team that there is never a moment of over-playing or embarrassment from either. It’s all very, very real and deliciously accessible to us as the emotional voyeurs in the relationship.

One of the challenges of Henderson’s piece is the integrating of the physical/emotional thread and the metaphors built within it to the naturalistic yet minimalist nature of the text and the times. In meeting this challenge Fergusson and her cast have been largely successful and this will evolve even more as confidence in the direction, the performances and working it all in the space becomes second nature. After all, a slight disconnect between Tom and Elizabeth is to be expected, especially early on, as their differing experiences of the war years kicks in. Tom is more emotionally closed off than the garrulous Elizabeth and this is well reflected in his somewhat stylized speech patterns pitched as they are against her striking naturalism. He is, after all, the archetypical 1950’s Kiwi male.

Henderson (and Fergusson) also insist that their actors to do all that difficult – but metaphorically critical – stuff with apples and knives. Extraordinary trust is required between actors and director and this is evident throughout as we wince in the dark wildly contemplating the bloody possibilities. Henderson is a genius at creating ‘what if’ moments and Fergusson and her actors are his equals in ensuring that all options stay on the table: what if he cuts her mouth, what if he chokes on the apple, what if he gets aroused (he is naked after all) and so all the moments connect and disconnect as prescribed and we remain engaged. Nothing much happens in ‘Skin Tight’ that isn’t choreographed but the plumbing is successfully hidden and the suspension of disbelief is maintained throughout.

Chris Neels plays Tom with an easy charm. He handles Henderson’s cagey language well enough and he’s certainly up for the physicals but there’s a dark side to Tom that Neels rarely exposes which could perhaps be a stronger driving force in Henderson’s litany of inner action. He deals with Elizabeth’s blunt admission of infidelity a tad too easily while his reflection on his own wartime indiscretions is held in a deeper, more private – and ultimately more interesting – place. If only forgiveness were that easy …

Neels’ path to Tom’s madness isn’t that clearly defined but it works well enough. He matches Julia Croft’s brilliant Elizabeth very well which is saying a lot as Croft is simply superb. She exposes Elizabeth’s humanity, her vulnerability, her flashing short-lived jealousy, her fear of death and her sexual passion with a rare naturalism that makes the production fairly zing. Particularly notable is her war monologue which is phrased and delivered to perfection. Crofts personifies the spirit of the working class post-war Kiwi rehab farmer (Tom has inherited his – the class difference is discussed but never augmented as a necessary textual tension) and she serves as a symbol for the embryonic feminist powerhouses of the following decade. She is a free spirit, one who loves her man in a deep and sensual way, a woman unafraid of her own sexuality, or his. Crofts performance is worth the price of the ticket alone but of course there’s much more on offer than just this.

Rounding out the cast is Jerry Beale as Tom-gone-mad in the final stanza. I have questions about whether this character is necessary at all but having the image of a post-Elizabeth Tom was worth a try and my questions can be answered by simply saying it was the director’s choice and as such it is what it is and you can make up your own mind.

Henderson structures his work with painstaking care and the use of Bob Amos’s classic bluegrass song ‘Where the Wild River Rolls’ is an intelligent touch. Kiwified, as someone like Phil Garland might do, the lyric is haunting and adds a bittersweet dimension to the work. Both actors sing competently which helps.

‘Skin Tight’ is a work full of carefully entwined beauty and Fergusson’s production shines with unanticipated moments of remarkable clarity: the tête-à-tête about their ‘first time’ together, the intensely sexual interludes with the knife, the overall mischievousness, the water play, shaving with the cut-throat razor, the profound sexual intimacy, the stripped bare honest nakedness and Elizabeth’s death all unfold on this 60 minute roller-coaster ride, before a psychic backdrop of Southern Alps, mid-summer heat and that incessant and irritating avian refrain.

‘Skin Tight’ is unashamedly about sex and death. Like the magpie’s refrain we can’t get away from it and why should we. There are no more human themes than these and Fergusson’s cast lets us have both barrels.

It’s a production with no shame and one which makes no apology, and nor should it. It’s a bloody good show, a show that wouldn’t be out of place in the studio at the Royal Court or back for another burst at the Edinburgh Fringe. Clever Mr Henderson to write a wonderful play with only two actors and props and cozzies that can all fit in a carry-on bag. Not only is it excellent art but it’s potentially financially viable as well.

Did I enjoy it? Yes.

Did it have a ‘wow’ factor? Yes, it did.

Should you go and see it? Yes, you should.

Revel in the sensuality of one of our best stories and, as a bonus, check out Croft’s exceptional talent and Fergusson’s gutsy direction.

You won’t regret it!

LYRIC: I’m Bound Where the Wild River Rolls

Where can I find some peace for my mind
I feel that my heart has grown cold
You left me alone this wide world to roam
So I’m bound where the wild river rolls

I’m bound where the wild river rolls
I’m bound where the tall pine trees grow
The cost of your love has taken it’s toll
So I’m bound where the wild river rolls

Five lonely years I’ve waited in vain
Hoping for you to come home
I told you that I could never doubt your love
So I’m bound where the wild river rolls

Author:  Bob Amos

POEM: The Magpies

When Tom and Elizabeth took the farm
The bracken made their bed
and Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said

Tom’s hand was strong to the plough
and Elizabeth’s lips were red
and Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said

Year in year out they worked
while the pines grew overhead
and Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said

But all the beautiful crops soon went
to the mortgage man instead
and Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said

Elizabeth is dead now (it’s long ago)
Old Tom’s gone light in the head
and Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said

The farms still there. Mortgage corporations
couldn’t give it away
and Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies say.

FROM: The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature

Glover, Denis (1912–80), poet, printer, publisher, satirist, sailor and boxer, was born in Dunedin. Following his parents’ divorce, he and his mother moved to New Plymouth where Glover spent the ‘bow and arrow stage of existence’.

At New Plymouth BHS he encountered military-style discipline, as boy scout and school cadet. As a scout Glover made his first foray into publishing, when he wrote, illustrated and printed a magazine called Signal Fire, which he sold to troop members for one penny.

In New Plymouth too, he affirmed the love of mountain-climbing established in Otago, and first experienced boats, paddling unstable corrugated-iron canoes on Lake Pukekura. He moved to Auckland GS where he met Bob Lowry; together they produced an unofficial class journal. In 1929 Glover transferred to the sixth form at Christ’s College, Christchurch, where he excelled academically and wrote what he later called ‘a vast quantity of very bad verse’ but won approval from his peers for his swimming, boxing and cross-country running.

In 1931 Glover enrolled at Canterbury University College, completing a BA in English and Greek in 1934. He won a New Zealand University Blue for boxing, and climbed with the Canterbury Mountaineering Club. Student expeditions in Arthur’s Pass National Park provided raw material for some of Glover’s finest work, including the ‘Arawata Bill’ sequence, and some of the ‘Sings Harry’ poems.

His love of writing led him towards journalism, editing the student magazine Canta (for which he interviewed Bernard Shaw), the annual university Review and the capping Revue, and serving as campus reporter on the Press. Printing, however, was the most significant activity. In 1932, at an Easter Sports Tournament in Auckland, he again met Lowry, who had set up a press for Auckland University College Students’ Association: one of its achievements was Phoenix. Encouraged by Lowry’s success Glover bought a hand-operated press and some type.

After a battle with conservative university authorities he was permitted to set up in a campus basement and established the Caxton Club to use and administer the press. Although the ostensible aim was the study of printing and typography, Glover later commented that ‘any young man with the means of disseminating opinion would be unworthy of his salt if he didn’t try to print something that would practically transform the world overnight’ (Hot Water Sailor).

The result was Oriflamme and the furore over ‘Sex and the Undergraduate’. The board of governors revoked the Caxton Club’s right to use College premises, and Glover, though not editor of Oriflamme, lost his job at the Press; in 1935, two years later, his reputation as a fire-brand cost him his job on the Wellington Dominion. Undaunted, Glover continued to develop the Caxton Club (see Caxton Press).

He found a venue for his disputatious nature in the independent left-wing Tomorrow. Throughout its seven years of publication, 1934–40, Glover contributed notes, poems, short stories and satirical verses under a variety of pseudonyms—‘Peter Kettle’ was a favourite—as well as his own name. An assistant lectureship in English at Canterbury University College helped subsidise this largely unpaid involvement with Tomorrow and the Caxton Club.

Twice stymied at journalism, Glover turned his attention more fully to printing. In 1935 he and his partner John Drew bought a power-driven press, setting it up in a disused stable. The following year saw the first publications under the imprint of the Caxton Press, which aimed to publish whatever literature of merit they could afford, and devote to its production what typographic and technical skills they could command. At Caxton, Curnow wrote, Glover ‘created a centre which, under his care, did more than any other to help good writing in New Zealand and to raise publishing and book production standards’.

At the time, the main venue for locally written poetry was the annual New Zealand Best Poems, edited by C.A. Marris. Glover passionately hated the pallid and sentimental verse Marris appeared to encourage, aiming instead at Caxton to promote socially responsible poetry. Heated mutual criticism culminated in Glover’s ‘The Arraignment of Paris’ (1937), in which he lampooned what he saw as Marris’s stranglehold on literary taste.

In retrospect, the satire also reveals a vein of sexism endemic in much writing of the time. Glover’s work at Caxton was interrupted by war. One of his last typographical works before leaving on secondment to the Royal Navy was Recent Poems (1941), with poems by Curnow, Fairburn, Mason and Glover, ‘The Magpies’ making its first appearance. In London Glover met publisher John Lehmann and in Oxford John Johnson, Printer to the University. Johnson taught Glover ‘more about printing than I had ever learned’. In London, Glover often stayed with Charles Brasch, discussing the possibility of establishing a literary magazine. Landfall appeared in March 1947, published by Caxton.

As a serviceman, Glover distinguished himself in the Arctic convoys, and later as a commander during the D-Day invasion. Promoted to the rank of lieutenant commander, his bravery earned him a DSC and a Soviet War Veteran’s Medal. He returned to Christchurch late in 1944 and began an extensive programme of publishing. The Wind and the Sand: Poems 1934–44, his first volume of mature verse, appeared in 1945.

Although he was always emotionally guarded in his verse, perhaps suspicious that writing poetry was not a particularly manly occupation, the war poems in The Wind and the Sand contrast sharply with the nonchalant understatements of his autobiography Hot Water Sailor (1962), which chronicles his early life and war experiences. The Wind and the Sand also contains some early ‘Sings Harry’ poems. Published complete in 1951, the ‘Sings Harry’ sequence discovered a new tone of nostalgia and introspection, albeit mediated by a strongly masculine persona.

In 1936 Glover had married Mary Granville, and their only child was born in July 1945. After the marriage ended in 1950, he moved into a relationship with Khura Skelton, which lasted until her death in 1969.

In the early 1950s he worked with sailing companion Albion Wright at Wright’s newly established Pegasus Press, and left Caxton in 1953. In 1954 he and Khura moved to Wellington where he worked for a while as an advertising copywriter. He worked for some time as production manager and typographer at the Wingfield Press and later tutored typography at the Technical Correspondence Institute. In the early 1960s Glover served as president of PEN and of the Friends of the Alexander Turnbull Library, which now holds his papers and manuscripts.

Throughout his life Glover was drawn to the sea. Navy service followed years of sailing with Albion Wright and the Banks Peninsula Cruising Club, and he spent several post-war years training volunteers for the Royal New Zealand Navy. All the major works reflect this love. Even ‘mountain’ poems such as ‘Arawata Bill’ and ‘Sings Harry’ conclude with images of the sea, which suggest the inevitability of change, and the spaces separating individuals.

The year 1948 saw a verse commentary for Cecil Holmes’s documentary The Coaster, made for the National Film Unit, a collaboration influenced by John Grierson’s work with W.H. Auden on the film Night Mail (1936). In 1955 ‘Towards Banks Peninsula—Mick Stimson’ appeared in Landfall. Another ‘Man Alone’ figure, Stimpson (Glover later found this to be the correct spelling) deserted from Queen Victoria’s navy and spent his last years quietly fishing and growing fruit at Port Levy near Lyttelton Harbour, where Glover came to know the old sailor.

In his long poem Glover put much of his characteristic reticence behind him and paid homage to the ‘old wrinkled warrior’ he perhaps regarded as a kindred spirit. Glover’s last-published collection, Towards Banks Peninsula—a long-contemplated series of poems about a much-loved area—appeared in 1979. Short poems capturing the changing moods of Wellington Harbour were among the best work of his final years.

Despite his interest in ‘men alone’, Glover was not himself a loner. From one relationship after Khura’s death came the love-lyrics To a Particular Woman (1970) and Diary to a Woman (1971). In 1971 Glover married Gladys Evelyn Cameron (‘Lyn’). In 1975 they visited Russia at the invitation of the Soviet Writers’ Union; the same year Victoria University of Wellington conferred an honorary DLitt. The old warrior never mellowed, however. His fearless opinions and rasping voice enlivened meetings of the Friends of the Turnbull and the New Zealand Poetry Society and his stage-whisper interjections were notorious, including a memorable comment on the modernised liturgy during the funeral of James K. Baxter.

A second volume of autobiography, Landlubber Ho! and a Selected Poems, introduced by Curnow, appeared in 1981. A further Selected Poems (1996) was compiled by Bill Manhire. Commentary includes J.E.P. Thomson’s Denis Glover (1977) and Gordon Ogilvie’s Introducing Denis Glover (1983). Three short films exist: ‘The Magpies’ (with interview with Glover, 1974), ‘Mick Stimson’ (a reading by Glover, 1974) and ‘The Coaster’ (with Glover’s verse commentary, ‘The Breeze’, 1948). Roger Hall’s play ‘Mr Punch’ (1989) deals with Glover’s life.