KEY POINTS:
Roger Hall, whom I am not going to call New Zealand's most commercially successful playwright, although he is - I don't want to annoy him, not just yet, anyway - is a bit twitchy the day I see him.
Alison Quigan, the director of his new play, Who
Wants to be 100? has been on the phone about making a few changes and while he says he's fine with that (I almost believe him), this sort of thing always makes him twitch a bit.
I think it doesn't take much to make him twitch a bit. It certainly doesn't take much to make him defensive. I managed it almost immediately by saying something a bit sneery about his Takapuna apartment in what I call "his gated community".
This was a continuation of an email exchange we'd been having about why he moved from Ponsonby to (insert sneery tone here) the North Shore, of all Godforsaken places. He knew I'd do it; he could have scripted it. But he says I'm making him defensive, or trying to.
Oh, what piffle. He's so easy to make defensive it takes no effort at all on my part. "Okay," he says, "I accept that."
He says "Okay, I accept that" or variations on it throughout the interview.
He uses these words to pretend to concede a point or to close off a subject. But because he just can't help himself, he will return to the matter with renewed conviction.
He is a funny fellow, although not, perhaps, funny in a ha ha sort of way. He comes across as very serious, a bit grumpy. There is a sense that he feels he has never been given his due. And he is a stewer. In 2000 the Guardian's theatre critic Michael Billington came to town. He gave a talk and afterwards people asked questions.
Hall used this opportunity to stand up and tick Billington off about a minor point he'd made in a review of a Hall play - 10 years before. This was followed by Hall demanding: "Should you not follow the Pope's example and apologise for all your sins?"
This is exhibit A in my case that he is cranky and over-sensitive. Hall says, "I know! Oh, well, that was just getting something off my chest. I wouldn't call it cranky."
What would he call it?
"Umm, human."
Yes, but 10 years after the event?
"Well, it was the first time I'd ever met him. It just shows, ha, these fester away, certain things. It was a totally pointless thing to do, I agree with you there. But I thought, 'Well, I always vowed I would do this, so I've done it.' I've lanced the boil really."
There have been a few other little episodes over the years: he took his name off the tent for a Mercury production of Multiple Choice because he hated the way the director had staged it. He took his name off the credits for a telly thing called Buck House because the finished scripts bore little resemblance to the ones he'd worked on. He points out that he did "the honourable thing" and gave the money he made from the Mercury production to charity. And "I think that was more principled than crankiness".
All right, then (or okay), but he was at it again last week during the Writers and Readers Festival when he stood up and challenged Lee Miller's biographer over the circumstances of the making of one of Miller's Dachau photographs. It had to have been staged, he said, because of course he knew better than the biographer.
He banged on about this at the festival and I am about to regret having raised it because he is about to bang on again, for quite some time. He gets to his feet to demonstrate how he must be right. "Do you want me to act it out for you?"
This is a hypothetical question which, actually, provides compelling evidence that he is a crank. This must have shown on my face because he goes on for a bit, doing his acting, then he says, "It doesn't matter, I agree, it was such a minor point. I should have let other people have more time."
But he just couldn't help himself. "No, that's probably true. You're making a very strong case. Okay."
He leaves the room briefly, returns and starts all over again: "Can you say that this man, looking at these appalling bodies, just stood there ... " and so on, and on.
Almost anyone else I'd suspect of putting this on - to make me regret having started it - as a way of saying, "All right, you accuse me of being a crank, I'll act like one". But I really don't think he can help it.
And it is funny, in a dry, Grumpy Old Man way. And it fills in the time.
Because, you may have noticed - and I'm sure the Auckland Theatre Company publicist has most certainly noticed - we haven't actually talked about the play yet. I'm all for not spending longer than five minutes on the free plug but it's polite, part of the game, to offer. So I ask him what happens in the play, about four old geezers in a resthome - and he says he doesn't want to talk about that. "What's the point of telling you when people might read it and think, 'Oh ... "'
The point might be that he's supposed to be selling his play. "Well, telling you what happens is not a selling document as far as I'm concerned. I'll sell it by saying it's the most wonderful cast of men you could ever assemble, two great women ... And I'd say some of it is very, very funny and there are moments of great sadness and the trick is whether I've got the balance right."
It opens, by the way, at SkyCity Theatre on Thursday - it galls me to do his plug for him, but some people might like to know.
Partly his reluctance to talk is superstition (not wanting to talk about the play until it's performed), partly it's because he dislikes reading anything about anything he goes to see in advance because he doesn't like to have the plot spoiled. And partly, I think, he doesn't have to: if it's a Roger Hall play, people will go.
Which brings me to another little matter - his famous sensitivity. He is New Zealand's most commercially successful playwright. I ask him if he enjoys this description, which I mean as a sincere compliment, but I know he doesn't. "There's a slight pejorative tone, I think." But why does he mind it when it's a statement of fact?
"Well, I do hear it used against me quite a bit and there's a school of thought that says, 'Well, if so many people go to it, it can't be a good play."' I think this might, at least partly, come from him because he is so sensitive.
"Yeah, I'm cranky, you see."
He is sensitive, "just occasionally", but why? "Oh, I don't know. Well, I mean ... as Woody Allen says, writing comedy means you never get to the top table."
Before I went to see him he sent me an email headed "yessssss!", an excerpt from an article about comic writing which ends: "It's time writers got back to the serious business of making us laugh."
He wants, or a bit of him does, to be taken seriously. So perhaps he should try to write "serious" plays. He's tried but he doesn't end up writing them because "probably I can't. Then I think, 'Well, I have a gift for writing humour and not that many people have it, so why fly in the face of that?' " Well, quite. He's had a terrific life, success he could never have dreamed of when he arrived from Britain in 1958, aged 19, an assisted immigrant destined for the public service.
He has made good money, his plays fill theatres, he considers himself blessed. I can't imagine why he even cares what people think. "Well, that's a good question. I don't know. I don't care that much, just occasionally."
He does care about the critics and he writes in his autobiography Bums on Seats, "Just occasionally you do want to go and slap a critic around a little." He never has. "No. Some playwrights have. There's still time!"
It's his nature to care, because he's just a bit cranky and sensitive and he does, remember, stew. But what would I know? According to him, he's a great wisecracker who loves banter. The one character he would have liked to play is John in Glide Time "because he was the guy who made all the jokes and funny remarks, which is what I do".
Now that is funny. "Ha, ha. You mean you haven't seen that side of me."
I felt a bit, not very, bad about being so insistent that he is a grumpy old man when he is really an outgoing, wisecracking, jolly gent.
So, to be fair, I give him a last chance and say: "Do you want to tell me a joke?"
"No," says Roger Hall, New Zealand's most commercially successful playwright and well-known funny man.
