The Theatre

2024 was a good year for the theatre, the theatre in me and even me in the theatre.

Just a tiny wee bit of me in the theatre

It’s a garbage misquote (by me) from the wonderful Raymond Hawthorne (‘love the theatre in you, not you in the theatre) who had most probably borrowed it from Constantin Stanislavski who famously said, ‘love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art’.

I sometimes think my life is just an end-on-end file of quotes made by other people and that I have no voice of my own.

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

“Effective learning involves ongoing, intelligent, disobedient acts that move knowledge beyond the constraints of formula.”

“At the centre of the learning paradigm is the student, not the curriculum.”

“Mostly I just shut up and get on with it.”

Only one of these quotes is from me. There’s one from Maya Angelou, one from Welby Ings, one from my favourite kata teacher, and one from me.

And there’s this “karate, like life, begins and ends with courtesy.”

I have been honoured with the role of co-ordinating theatre reviews for the Tāmaki Makaurau  Auckland region which means I get to work with an extraordinary bunch of managers, producers and directors, and a talented array of writers, thinkers, theatre practitioners, and performers from the full gamut of performing arts styles, forms, and disciplines.

Apart from being in plays and directing plays and designing plays and organising all the detritus that goes with that all of which is pretty much beyond my capability now, I have the best of all worlds. Do I ever lust after a return to the stage? Not really. I remember Raymond Hawthorne saying to us as strong-limbed young actors, ‘the first thing that goes as we age is the legs.’ Never a truer word. Despite my legs going – and they most certainly have – Theatreview ensures I continue to have the joy of engaging in the theatre experience without any of the pain and grief that sometimes goes with it. I have no lines to forget, props to break, colleagues to avoid, or crushes to wallow in, and I can have a sneaky glass of vino at half time if I want to.

I have to add, at this point, how grateful I am to Cushla and Finn who come to the shows with me and help me manoeuvre those challenging things called stairs and who advise me when my hearing aids have failed, and I have missed something important.

It’s great to have perceptive company and they are the greatest.

My boss, John Smythe, is the very best of men, a true man of the theatre who guides me and mildly rebukes me when I need it, which is occasionally, and certainly not never. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity that he and the Theatreview Trust have given me and I hope I pay them back in ways that make what they have honoured me with, worthwhile for them too. 

The reviewers I work with are astonishing bunch, rich in experience, knowledge and insight, and I love them all to bits. They don’t get paid for the work they do but instead receive two complementary tickets to the shows they review which, while a treat, doesn’t come close to matching the expenditure associated with providing the review – transport costs, parking, preparation time, hospitality, attending the performance, more travel time, crafting the review, and sending it on to me. I can only speak for myself, but this is at least twelve hours work per review plus, in my case, the cost of a third ticket, but it’s cheap at half the price for the richness it brings to my life.

When there is funding available which certainly isn’t always the case, I am paid for the organisational work I do. Don’t tell funders but, even if no recompense was forthcoming, I’d do the work anyway. It’s that important. Theatreview has been providing the performing arts sector with this service across Aotearoa New Zealand for at least two decades and the archive alone constitutes a most valuable historical resource that is second to none. As an academic I salivate at the possibilities that such a resource provides, and for this alone – there’s much more of course – Theatreview and John Smythe deserve all the bouquets, plaudits, and accolades they get. Sadly, its 2025, acclaim is bloody hard to come by but the brickbats still come thick and fast, so it’s especially satisfying that the work I/we do is, in itself, sufficient reward.