Auckland, a city once rich in live theatre, has just two historic ones remaining. Hamish Keith makes a special plea for the revival of the Mercury.
In 1988, His Majesty's Theatre was reduced to a pile of rubble virtually overnight. I was one of the last tenants hanging on in the adjoining arcade. The morning after this urban crime I watched an elderly couple making their way down the arcade to view the ruins. They were both in tears. They stood there for about an hour comforting one other and I wondered then and wonder now what their story was. Had they been old troupers who performed there in their heyday? Lovers who had pledged their love in the old theatre's draughty stalls? I realised then that heritage is about more than just buildings.
Hirini Moko Meade once wrote that the names we give to features in the landscape are a "grid of meaning" we lay over the land to allow us to live in it. Rather than wandering as strangers on the land, we identify it with a string of names commemorating our ancestors, myths or great events, or simply identifying places that supply us with the things we need to live.
A city's heritage is exactly that - a grid of buildings and places which give our lives within it a continuity - a thread of meaning tying us to our past, enriching our present and giving us the energy to imagine a lively future. No buildings do that for us more than our historic theatres.
In Auckland, in the roll call of the demolished, no other kind of building features larger. Not simply because of their number, but for the larger damage the demolition of each has done to the character of Auckland as a metropolitan city. No other New Zealand city has shown such a crude disregard for the richness of its theatrical past. Yet the city was once almost as rich in theatres as it was in corner pubs.
Like the rest of the country, Auckland between 1880 and 1914 had a golden age of theatre. An endless parade of overseas companies performed vaudeville, drama, opera and musicals. Among them were 70 Shakespearean productions, 40 operas and musicals, countless plays and solo performances by great opera singers and many not so great. There was every kind of act from Minstrels, standup comics and a Lilliputian Opera Company of small boys. And we had a small army of entrepreneurs building theatres to house them.
The Fuller Company alone built 60 theatres throughout New Zealand. "Going to Fullers tonight" was a familiar weekend greeting in most New Zealand towns.
The arrival of the movies added to the endless jamboree of entertainment and these theatres were adapted to fit them into the urban theatrical diet. In 1912 the Victoria in Devonport was the first theatre purpose-built for film.
Auckland must have seemed a city of magic. Perhaps its passing was what that old couple were mourning beside the wreckage of His Majesty's.
Now in the central city only two of those historic theatres remain: the marble and gilt splendour of the St James, mouldering shamefully away on Queen St right in the centre of the city's "cultural precinct", and the Mercury, in good shape and available for purchase in Mercury Lane, but given the cold shoulder by the city's theatrical establishment for reasons difficult to discern.
Designed by Edward Bartley and built in 1910 as the Kings Theatre, the Mercury is Auckland's oldest surviving theatre. Although it showed movies from the outset - the first colour film screened in New Zealand was shown there on Christmas Eve 1911 - it was designed primarily as a live drama venue. It remained that on and off until 1990 when the Mercury Theatre Company folded. It is now a church, but has been maintained and partly restored, and is still available for theatrical performance. The Auckland Opera Studio staged Kurt Weill's Seven Deadly Sins there recently.
In 1926, when it was the Prince Edward Cinema, the gloriously eccentric K' Rd entrance - known now as the Norman Ng Building - was added. The Mercury Lane entrance is an imposing facade - an Edwardian subdued Baroque Revival. The facade, tucked away down a steepish street without much to encourage foot traffic, attracts little attention. This lack of passers-by is one of the reasons suggested for the lack of agitation by some of Auckland's theatrical administrators for its purchase as a home for an Auckland theatre company.
That's a weirdly circular argument since the Mercury is all there is in that part of the street and if nothing happens at the Mercury no one will go there. In any case, restoration of the skinny Ng Building as an entrance to the theatre would gloriously solve the problem of a busy pedestrian frontage and there are few streets as lively and theatrical as K' Rd.
One of the great views of the Mercury is looking back from Upper Queen St. From this vantage there is no doubt this building is a theatre, a great performing space raking down to the proscenium and rising to the fly hoists. The city has a responsibility to its great theatrical past to restore our oldest theatre to a contemporary theatrical life. It stands solidly in our public space. All it needs is the players and the plays to fill it.
Auckland theatre hasn't gone away - it is as rich as it's ever been - it is just hiding.
In itself that is a powerful economic argument for reviving the Mercury. We could not easily afford to build a theatre on this scale. We certainly could not buy the theatrical history that enriches every one of its bricks, coloured glass domes, tiled floors or exuberant plaster swags.
We do not have to invent some new use for the Mercury - just put it back in theatrical ownership, open the doors and raise the curtain.
Soul of the City
The second of our series of guest essays about preserving Auckland's architectural 'heritage' coincides with the Auckland Heritage Festival, which has the worthy aim of encouraging us 'to celebrate, embrace and learn about Auckland city's unique natural, social and built heritage'. What concerns many is how easily - whether by neglect or demolition - links to the city's past can be lost.
*Hamish Keith is an Auckland writer.
