Fighting for room at the bach

By GREG DIXON

It's the sort of thing you would think a writer would hate. Around a table, packed with coffee cups, biscuits and well-thumbed scripts, four actors and a director are conducting a nip-and-tuck operation on Stephen Sinclair's new play The Bach. And there sits the playwright himself as they dissect his work.

In the cramped Ponsonby rehearsal space, director Sarah Peirse and her cast are well into rehearsing this Auckland Theatre Company production. They've already blocked out scenes, but they're having a late read-through, usually an early part of the process, because Sinclair has been out of the country.

But there are no signs of conniptions from the playwright. He listens intently as each puts their case for a contraction here, a polish there, and offers his view.

Ask Sinclair, one of the country's most successful playwrights, whether he gets precious about others prodding and reshaping his words and he professes, after a pause, "I try not to be".

There's another silence. Then Peirse says to him, "Some things you really hold on to and you fight for and that's good."

Adds Sinclair: "I think when you're writing drama you are to some extent always second-guessing how it's going to sound. The longer you do it the more accurate you become. But you can never be totally certain, so it's vital to have a chance to hear it."

Of course The Bach, which previews tomorrow before opening on Saturday at the Herald Theatre, has been through something like this before this read-through.

Written three years ago, it has been developed by the ATC's Literary Unit, which involves readings and workshopping. A draft of the play was given a short season at the SiLo Theatre last year before being slotted in for a full season in 2004. The process is a damned good one, Sinclair believes. "Basically," says the author of The Bellbird and Ladies Night, "it's hell of a difficult to get a play right. And this is a great way to be able to get the play up."

Middle-class angst is the play's turf, as two middle-aged brothers hook up for the first time in years at their family's Coromandel bach, a place of countless, precious childhood memories.

Michael (Phillip Gordon), a booze-hound journalist and failed writer, is just back from England. Older brother Simon (Peter Elliott) is a moderately successful lawyer with a marriage on the rocks.

Simon has arrived with wife Sally (Jennifer Ward-Lealand), a PR consultant with dreams of film scripting, in the hope of sorting out their problems - only she's brought along a young Maori woman, Hana (Miriama McDowell), who works for her.

Over an evening, as the booze flows, and through the morning-after, there are, as usually happens after "a few", a lot of things said - with a key symbol of everything that is wrong in their world being the public dunny that the council has built right next door to the bach.

Sinclair says the play was an opportunity for him to cram all his personal preoccupations into 90 minutes of drama - not least the dunny. His family also has a bach in the Coromandel and the council did stick a public toilet right next door to it.

"That's been an obsession in the family since it went up about 10 years ago. But The Bach is really about Pakeha identity, I suppose.

"It's also about the whole disillusionment of middle-age, your failure to realise your ambitions, your failure to form meaningful, enduring relationships.

"I think with the whole kind of rise of confidence among Maoridom, the right for Pakeha to feel an identity with the land has been challenged and Michael feels particularly incensed that people might challenge his right to feel this is his place.

"The whole development of the foreshore issue means elements of the play have acquired an incredible topicality."

One magazine critic observed after last year's SiLo season that the play was saved from falling too far into cliche by some tough-minded and often hilarious observations about disintegrating marriages, racism, political correctness and the drinking habits of the Kiwi male - vicious, drunken "truth telling" followed by hungover remorse.

Sinclair, the magazine said, has fun shooting clever barbs at literary icons, the film industry and biculturalism. But it observed there was some unevenness in the writing and the play could be pared back, especially in the first half.

Some tightening work has been done since last year, including the read-through I walked in on, although Sinclair says the play came together quite quickly in the first draft. There haven't been any really profound modifications since then. It was just a question of refining the script and improving pace and developing character, he says.

"My other plays that I've had go through this process have often started out far less developed and they've needed more input and trials and have involved me going away and really seriously reworking structure and changing character really quite profoundly. But I'm pleased to say, in this case, it hasn't involved such a kind of painful process."

Also pleasing for him, the cast and director is that The Bach season has almost sold out before opening night from the ATC's subscription base alone - probably on the back of good word of mouth from last year's version.

This has never happened to Sinclair before and it's unbelievable, he says.

"Maybe it's something to do with the sentimental attachment we have towards the bach, maybe that's the appeal."

Whatever the reasons, it is incredibly encouraging, Peirse believes. "I know [last month's ATC production of Roger Hall's] Spreading Out has done very good box office. And now with The Bach following, it's an incredibly important statement about New Zealanders wanting to see New Zealand theatre."

On stage

* What: The Bach

* Where and when: Herald Theatre, July 8-August 8