Over the past couple of days, I’ve had cause to reflect on theatre in Aotearoa and how, for 35 years, I slipped in and out of this divine, if somewhat ephemeral, art form virtually unnoticed.
Before the haters leap for the Oxford for a reminder of how to spell ‘snowflake’, let me just say I’m perfectly happy with that because, like my 25 years blundering about in tertiary education, the theatre was a career I should never ever have had.
If Miss Boldero of Linwood North School hadn’t rounded up her class of post-war, working-class misfits and dragged us off to see the New Zealand Players production of Ngaio Marsh’s A Unicorn for Christmas I’d never have got the bug, but I did, and the rest is … a bit of a blur really. I loathed school but this bit was good. We had to write about it and that was my first review.
The second was in 1960 and I was in the 4th form. Mrs Moore was my English teacher, and she set us all a writing task: write a play and she’d produce the best one. My Sir Gawain and the Green Knight won, and she was true to her word and staged it. I reviewed her production of my play, but it’s been lost in the mists along with the dozen or so handwritten (in Mrs Moore’s crabby hand) versions of my script. Yes, she hand-wrote a copy for each actor, and I recall that, even though it’s 53 years ago, being very moved by that and that was that for the theatre until 1970 when tradition in the form of the Ohura Choral and Dramatic Society came calling.
MORE TO COME …
dykiegirl 