Taking off at SkyCity Theatre

Many young Kiwis are so relaxed about travel, it's easy to forget there are older New Zealanders who have never left the country, or have limited their sojourns to short holidays in the Pacific and Australia. But the other side of the world? Going to Britain and Europe is a huge deal when you do it for the first time and you're in your 50s. Or older. And alone.

The terror, loneliness and sheer exhilaration of the experience is the basis for Taking Off, Roger Hall's comedy-drama about four women in their 50s who each take themselves off to London to live and work. It has attracted packed seasons in Wellington, Palmerston North and Dunedin. So if Hall's recent successes in Auckland with Middle Age Spread, the revival, and Spreading Out are any gauge, SkyCity Theatre is set to, ah, take off over the next three weeks.

The four women are all escaping from something in New Zealand - boredom, routine, bad relationships - or no relationships. Jean (Alison Quigan) is a tense former librarian who's been made redundant. Frankie (Annie Whittle) is a teacher who's won Lotto. Ruth (Fiona Samuel) is a naive farmer's wife who ups-sticks when she discovers her husband is having an affair, while Noeline (Jennifer Ludlam) is a nurse worn down by years of nursing her terminally ill husband.

Each relates their experiences to the audience via various devices: a diary, emails back home, phone conversations and the writing of a novel. They may all be on the stage at the same time, but each one is going through a separate journey and growing up a great deal in the process.

The idea for the work started through a woman Hall met when he was giving a talk. "She emailed me and said there was an amazing group of women who are vintage and having the time of their lives, and I think there's a play in it," says Hall. "I sat on it for about a year and decided she was right. I approached Ana Samways [who runs the Herald's Sideswipe column], one of my former students in my playwrighting course, and she put in a little paragraph about me looking for women who'd travelled for the first time later in life.

"I got a huge number of replies. I sent the women a questionnaire and followed up a great many. Some I talked to over the phone, some I met individually and I had a group of them come around. The women were very generous."

Hall says he learnt through the women's anecdotes that travelling alone "was a big adventure, a wonderful time and also terrible times".

"These characters are sometimes very lonely. One of the frustrations of travelling alone is coming home to an empty hotel room at the end of an exciting day and having no one to talk to."

In Taking Off, each of the women discovers things about themselves which propel them into a new way of thinking about their lives and their capabilities. "Well, if you come home from travelling without change, you've learnt nothing," says Hall.

The women refer to "going to do their OE", surely an Antipodean turn of phrase used nowhere else in the world. "It is such a way to go," Hall explains. "Especially when you had to travel by ship, it was such a long way you had to stay a long time and you did get more out of it."

As for Hall, he'll be here for the opening preview tomorrow night, then he's taking himself off, on a cycling tour in Europe. "It's a nice life if you can get it," he agrees. "But my income has always been a huge rollercoaster. Some years are very good, some not much at all."

Performance

*What: Taking Off, by Roger Hall
*Where and when: SkyCity Theatre, June 2-25