A sting in the union tale

The boardroom becomes a battleground when the unionists try to negotiate. Photo / Phil Ormsby

With the election looming, the time is right to stage Wild Bees, writes Dionne Christian

In 1984, when the fourth Labour government was newly elected, Phil Ormsby became a union delegate and his fellow telecommunications workers, who had survived the Muldoon years, told him life would be sweet now National was out and the supposedly more worker-friendly Labour party in.

Little did they know that a swarm of neo-liberal economic reform - Rogernomics, named after the finance minister of the time, Roger Douglas - was about to descend. Terms such as restructuring, voluntary redundancy, privatisation, state-owned enterprises, asset sales, employment contracts and free market would start to pepper daily conversation; jobs for life became a thing of the past.

Ormsby witnessed it all and eventually found himself a contractor with more time on his hands to pursue his passion for theatre and playwriting. He and partner Alex Ellis formed Flaxworks Theatre and have spent the past decade writing, producing and touring a diverse range of works around New Zealand and Australia.

Their next production is Wild Bees, a play which harks back to the 1980s and '90s and is based on Ormsby's own experiences as a union delegate.

The boardroom quickly becomes a battleground when a union team tries to re-negotiate an employment contract with a confused old-school manager and a team of young whippersnapper lawyers and human resources executives.

Set in 1991, it's dirty politics as it happened back then. Ormsby says the more outrageous the drama and comedy on stage, the more likely it is to have occurred in real life.

"I remember talking with people at the time and saying it should be a movie because, in future, people wouldn't believe it actually happened," he says. "It is part tragedy and part farce, which is how I remember those days."

Ormsby wrote Wild Bees, named after a James K. Baxter poem, some time ago and says the play has sat in a drawer waiting for the right time to be produced. With the election looming, he and Ellis figured it was now or never.

"Overall, I'm amazed at how little this period in New Zealand's history is talked about because it was such a watershed time and radically altered our history. With an election, what better time to remind ourselves about what changed and get people thinking about what we want to happen in future."

He's quick to reassure that Wild Bees is comedy, which is the main reason veteran actor and director Stuart Devenie agreed to direct it. Devenie says he read the play and liked it because it made him laugh. "Phil has written a very serious play, but also a very funny one. The surface story is about a union but it's really about power and how people use it."

Ellis, who plays a pushy HR executive, says Wild Bees is a big step forward for Flaxworks as it has a large cast: Donogh Rees, Kevin Keys, Alistair Browning, Wesley Dowdell, Emma Newborn, Damien Avery, Alexander Campbell, Jordan Blaikie and Ellis.

"The biggest cast we've ever had until now has been two, so this is a huge leap for us," she says. "We kind of randomly assigned parts to everyone at the first read-through and it turned out everyone suited the role they'd been assigned to. Although there are nine characters, each has their own individual voice."

Dowdell says he usually plays more comic characters, but Wild Bees sees him as a harried union lawyer.

"I don't usually get to play intelligent characters - I don't know why that is - so this is a little bit different for me and it's great."