Playwright Sir Roger Hall is back with his 41st play. Photo / Dean Purcell
It’s almost 50 years since Sir Roger Hall’s first play, Glide Time, burst onto the stage. With his latest show about to open in Auckland, can the man with the Midas touch still spin box-office gold?
“The hardest question to answer of all time is, ‘What do you want for lunch?’”
If you think that sounds like a Roger Hall line, you’re probably right. The playwright himself isn’t sure.
At 86, Sir Roger has written so many hundreds of thousands of words that he’s to be forgiven for forgetting a few of them.
We were at his apartment overlooking Takapuna Beach when he came across that line about lunch at the top of a document on his computer.
“One of yours?” I asked, assuming it was a quote from one of his plays.
“I think so,” he said. “I’ve just noted it down and thought I’d use it somewhere.”
Hopefully, he’ll forgive me for getting in first.
Over the past five decades, Hall has created a roll call of hit comedies for the stage, TV sitcoms, a pantomime version of Cinderella and a radio show for the BBC. He’s also had a few misses along the way.
If there’s no such thing as an overnight success – he’d been writing in one way or another for 15 years before bursting through with his first play, Glide Time – there’s no such thing as an overnight failure, either. Both require dedication and a considerable amount of hard work.
“Writing can be a joy when it goes well,” says Hall, whose 41st play, End of Summer Time, opens in Auckland next month.
Resurrecting one of his most popular characters, Dickie Hart, the one-man show is heading north after an extended six-week run at Wellington’s Circa Theatre, where there wasn’t a single empty seat in the house.
“Most of the time, you wouldn’t swap this for anything. But sometimes you crave to go into an office where you know what the day’s work ahead is going to be and you don’t have to think, because there’s somebody to tell you what to do.”
It’s comforting, somehow, to know it hasn’t always come easy. According to Hall, he’s “not good at plot”, isn’t interested in description and keeps telling himself never to write another musical. So far, he’s done four.
“Half the money for twice the work,” he jokes, although the odd royalty cheque still arrives for Footrot Flats: The Musical, which has been staged 130 times. Last month, he received a “modest” sum for a new production by the Hopetoun Amateur Theatrical Society in Western Australia.
Running through his playlist, he ticks off some of the wins and losses in his theatre career.
The Share Club, inspired by the get-rich fervour of “mum and dad” investors before the 1987 market crash, was one of the wins, becoming Downstage Theatre’s longest-running play.
I’d never heard of A Way of Life, the story of a multi-generational farming family, which he considers one of his best works.
“No one else thinks so, because there’s not enough humour. The first night [in 2001], it got a standing ovation at Tauranga, but a lot of people didn’t want a serious play from me. I was hugely disappointed in that one.”
Audiences stayed away from his more cerebral, political pieces like The Rose, a thinly veiled attack on the Muldoon era. Then again, nobody wanted to know about golf (Golf: A Love Story), either.
Well, I wouldn’t go to a play about golf, I tell him.
“You’re not alone,” he grumbles, good-naturedly. His weekly coffee group felt much the same.
“I did some research and asked how many of them would go to see a play about golf. No one? Okay, well, I’m still going to write it.”
Of course, it’s his remarkable string of successes that people do remember. No offence, I say, tongue-in-cheek, to the man typically described as New Zealand’s most successful playwright. But if you’re not much good at plot or description, what exactly are you good at, then?
He pauses, considering the question seriously for a moment. “Funny dialogue, really. And good characters.”
It’s easy to forget just how transformational Hall’s influence has been on the New Zealand theatre scene, creating an appetite for local productions at a time when quality was still equated with (often mediocre) British plays.
Next year, it’ll be half a century since Glide Time affectionately satirised Wellington’s public service bureaucracy. It sold out after the first night.
The late John Clarke wrote of Hall’s ability to identify “the faults and follies that highlight small monsters in ordinary people”.
Ironically, his knack for nailing the angst and aggravations of the Kiwi middle class was shaped by his own childhood back in England.
Biffed out of school by his father for under-performing academically, he worked in insurance for a couple of years before setting sail for Wellington in the late 1950s to avoid being called up for compulsory national service. He’d just turned 19.
His life came full circle, 20 years later, when he won Comedy of the Year with a production of Middle Age Spread on London’s West End, starring Richard Briers and Paul Eddington from The Good Life.
Hall, who was presented with the award by Sir John Gielgud, thought the original Circa show was just as good.
Generally speaking, his foreign origins haven’t been held against him here. “Max Cryer used to say, ‘Of course, you’re English!’ I’d tell him I may be English, but I’m a New Zealand writer because all my writing was done here. And I don’t think like an English writer, I’m sure.”
By the time Hall released his 1998 biography, Bums on Seats, he’d already recorded $20 million in box-office sales.
According to Playmarket NZ, two of the most licensed plays in New Zealand this century were written by Hall: Four Flat Whites in Italy, about two retired couples on a late-life OE, and Social Climbers, where five high-school teachers get trapped in a tramping hut.
It’s true, there’s a generation (or two) for whom the concept of a Roger Hall play dates back to the ark. Despite his reputation for supporting emerging playwrights, he is not – possibly never has been – considered particularly cool.
However, older theatregoers remain staunch supporters of the arts in these straitened times and much of his audience has aged alongside him, remaining fiercely loyal.
Since its opening season in 1993, the Auckland Theatre Company has averaged a Roger Hall play every two years, banking on the kind of box-office returns that allow riskier scheduling elsewhere on the programme.
His 2020 show, Winding Up, revisited Barry and Gen from his 90s hit Conjugal Rites, as they bickered their way through retirement.
End of Summer Time sees the return of another fan favourite, Dickie Hart, a Roger Hall kind of character name if ever there was one.
The curmudgeonly cow cocky made his first appearance in the one-man show C’mon Black, about his life-changing trip to the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa (where the defeated All Blacks may or may not have been deliberately “poisoned”).
In the sequel You Gotta Be Joking, Dickie and wife Glenda had upped sticks from the farm and moved to Wellington. Now, much to Dickie’s horror, they’re relocating north to be closer to the grandchildren.
Auckland! It’s crowded, expensive… Traffic’s terrible. All everyone thinks about is money. And they don’t even have a decent footie team. Auckland! Over my dead body. It’s a deal, Glenda says.
Tickets are selling strongly for the show, following the massive success of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, which has been scheduled for a return season next February.
Andrew Grainger will play Dickie, with Alison Quigan as director. Hall’s long-time collaborator, she’s worked on more than 20 of his productions, on and off the stage.
With End of Summer Time, Hall wanted to write a play about someone close to his age – Dickie is in his 70s. It’s also a love letter to Auckland, where he and wife Dianne have lived for many years now after moving up from Dunedin, where he had a long association with the Fortune Theatre.
From the first day, he felt very much at home. “It was warm, it was vibrant,” he says. “Auckland is a wonderful arts city, but hardly anyone recognises that. In fact, it has a more diverse and more interesting arts scene than Wellington. The difference is Wellingtonians are proud of it.”
The title, End of Summer Time, echoes the late Bruce Mason’s acclaimed one-man show, The End of the Golden Weather, which made a huge impression on Hall when he saw it in the early 60s.
In 2005, he arranged for a scene from Mason’s play set on Takapuna Beach to be performed there on Christmas Day – a ritual that has since become a popular annual tradition.
Another of his legacies is the recently established Roger Hall Theatre Trust, managed by the Arts Foundation. A $25,000 laureate is awarded every second year, alternating with five “Out of the Limelight” awards of $5000 each, acknowledging vital contributions behind the scenes.
Despite his many accolades, Hall’s work has often been met by critics with muted enthusiasm. Being popular – getting “bums on seats” – is looked down on by some with an element of snobbery that must have stung him at times.
“Yes, certainly,” he admits. “But then you think, ‘I’m a bit hurt, but gosh, look at the bookings!’ That’s better than the other way around: wonderful reviews but nobody’s going. So, it is a consolation to think the public seem to like it.
“Woody Allen says something about how writing comedy means you never get to dine at the top table. In other words, it’s never really regarded by critics as worthy of a ‘serious’ play. Yet the message can be almost more important and it certainly needs the most skill.”
His great inspiration, British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, is just a couple of months younger than Hall and still writing the kind of comedies both men love, with an underlying sense of pathos.
As an older Pākehā man, Hall is aware the ground is shifting to make way for a new wave of writers with different views and different things to say. He’s been dabbling with another play, but so far it’s not leaping off the page.
“I dutifully tap away a bit, hoping that it’ll catch fire and it hasn’t. But I can hardly complain. After 50 years of playwriting, if the muse decides it’s done with me, then that’s fair enough.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.
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