We are on the way to our first NZ Theatre month in September, thanks to Roger Hall and friends. I hope you’re going to celebrate with us and attend at least a couple of plays.
If you go to the Karetao website you can read the newsletters or have them sent to you.
Theatre Is exciting, invigorating and thought-provoking. Theatre is a scene in Kaitaia, a sitting room in Belgravia, night. day.then or now – it can make you laugh and it can make you cry. It can make you think and it can make you remember the things you thought you’d forgotten.
Theatre’s a hard business and its a struggle to get our stories told. That’s not new. The great shadow of British and USA scripts were always considered more important than anything we could produce here.
The NZ Players, our first professional theatre company. was started in 1952 by Edith and Richard Campion, The Globe in Dunedin began in 1961 when Rosalie and Patric Carey decided to present ‘theatre in a house’. The Globe is still going strong bless it. In its early days it presented all of James K Baxter’s plays as well as Shakespeare and Aeschylus.
Allen Hall has always promoted and commissioned NZ works for the students to work on and present to the public..
The other theatre in Dunedin, The Fortune, has alas, ceased, but the Court in Christchurch, is thriving and presenting new NZ works sprinkled among overseas scripts. There is the Auckland Theatre Company in Auckland and Circa in Wellington, both of whom succeed in attracting audiences.
Maori and Pasifika theatre companies and groups have made very significant contributions to theatre in Autearoa. Often with little or no help they get out there and tell the stories. .
And there are the community theatre companies all over the country which have been going for years and where people keep a local theatre going with enthusiasm and commitment and very little money. Amdof curse no-one gets paid. Its all done with love.
There are groups of actors who set up their own theatre entities. They always have and they always will. They don’t make any money, a living wage is a dream, but they keep going. Some of these groups travel to small and large places to present their work. All depends on the money, honey.
Playmarket is the agency through which we all operate. it acts as an agent, it organises workshops, has a bookshop, publishes plays, puts out a monthly bulletin and an annual print production about theatre in Aotearoa NZ and does a million other things. Its the Mama Spider linking us all whether we’re writers, actors, producers, directors, designers, whatever. If you have anything to do with theatre you’ll know Playmarket.
There’s a Wellington monthly brochure written by Sarah Delahunty called Scene. She does interviews with directors, writers and organisers of theatre groups and then writes about them. I’m not sure which cafes have them but they’re free which is amazing. Look around and find one.
So there’s no excuse really. You have a lot of choice. All you have to do is make sure that you go to (at least) two NZ plays during September and that you make up your mind to repeat these visits as often as possible as often as you can afford it.
And if you’re around the National Library in Wellington on September Monday 3 at 12.10pm, Roger Hall and I are presenting My Life in Theatre.
See you there.
Renée
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