How the other half live

By GREG DIXON

What did Mrs Midas think when her mad, wishing husband's hands turned all to gold? Would not Mrs Icarus have been rather irked by her spouse's wax-brained flying scheme? And what exactly did Mrs Rip Van Winkle do while her hubby snoozed?

If you've ever wondered what the other halves of history, myth, literature and fable might actually have thought of their old men's shenanigans, of their betrayals, self-deceptions and wax-brained schemes, then you will be pleased to learn The World's Wife has a theory or two.

The Auckland Theatre Company production is not so much history as his-story but as her-story, imagining and unravelling the women behind the famous and infamous men.

And it's new theatre - it debuted at last year's New Zealand Festival in Wellington - that is not so much a play as poetry which has shape shifted.

Indeed the woman behind the concept, Auckland actor, writer and director Fiona Samuel, has done something terribly clever. She has taken a book of poetry - The World's Wife, a 1999 collection by Glasgow-born English poet Carol Ann Duffy - and, in collaboration with others, brought Duffy's luminous, sometimes hilarious and sometimes tragic poems to the stage.

But The World's Wife the theatre production, which opens at Auckland's Maidment Theatre on Tuesday, is not simply poetry read aloud. It is poetry performed.

"Pocket opera is a term that appeals to me," Samuel says. "We wanted it to be spare but also quite grand and elegant so that people did feel it was right seeing it in a theatre rather than, say, a cafe.

"The poems are all about big, gutsy emotions like opera: passion, jealousy, rage, despair, fury and hopelessness. And to me that was what gave them the right to be in a theatre. They're dealing with all the same emotional journeys that the great playwrights do."

The poems, which traverse territory from BC to present day, from Mrs Aesop to Elvis' twin sister, may not be known to many, but should be familiar to all.

"Time and time again Duffy will say, through her poems, here's a story you think you know, but here's a completely different way of looking at it which is completely valid and surprising."

On her own turf, the award-winning Duffy has been controversial. In 1999 she, along with Andrew Motion, was a frontrunner to be new British Poet Laureate. Talent turned out not to be enough: with her bisexuality and her refusal to write poems for the Royal Family she was passed over for the position by the Blair administration. It plumped instead for the traditionalist Motion.

But it wasn't until early 2000 that Samuel discovered her - on Auckland's Northwestern Motorway. Driving along, she switched on Kim Hill's then Nine To Noon show on National Radio to hear Duffy reading her poem Mrs Midas in a soft, flat, riveting voice. An interview followed, but Samuel had already made up her mind to find a copy of the poems. She wolfed them in one sitting.

"I thought they were fantastic and they should be on stage. I saw theatrical potential in them because they're all characters speaking, they're all first-person dramatic monologues.

"These were characters telling stories, but it had the added bonus that the language was beautiful, great rhymes, great rhythms. I could see them coming to life really easily - I knew it would be nothing like a poetry reading."

Interestingly, Samuel has had no direct contact with Duffy: "That's not something she wants to do." The use of the poems, the rights for New Zealand and Australia, were negotiated through Duffy's publisher Pan Macmillan.

The work was auditioned, then commissioned and produced by last year's New Zealand Festival. Acclaim was the response.

Herald arts editor Linda Herrick called the production "superb", with the rapid-fire sequences by turns hilarious, menacing and sad. The National Business Review called it "succulent entertainment".

"I'd love Duffy to see it," Samuel says. "The festival were very keen for her to come out and be part of Writers and Readers Week, but she's not very enthusiastic about travelling on the festival circuit. She's been supportive from afar. She sent her best wishes."

In any case, the production goes beyond Duffy's words. Music, too, is significant. Mutton Birds musician Don McGlashan came onboard, composing a score which runs through the entire show.

"I thought if they are going to be on in a theatre they've got to be visually exciting," Samuel says. "The words make them aurally exciting, but I thought there should be music as well."

Samuel and McGlashan are just two of an exceptional confluence of local talent bringing alive these poems from half a world away. The show's other two players are Elizabeth McRae and Rachel House; their director is the head of acting at Tio Whakaari, Miranda Harcourt; their frocks are by fashion designer Marilyn Sainty; the music is recorded by McGlashan and former Birds guitarist David Long.

The poems - and only 20 of the book's 30 poems appear in the show; some were excluded because they tread similar emotional ground to others - have not been adapted or changed in any way. Samuel says Duffy's gift with language is extraordinary and she did not wish to dilute or alter it.

And so rather than a fourth-wall drama of dialogue, the characters speak through Duffy's poetry to the audience.

"Because there are so many themes that run through the collection, I knew it wouldn't just be like a series of disparate stories. They are all very strongly linked."

Those themes, Samuel says, rise from female experience. So, of course, she's been asked whether the poems are a feminist collection and make, therefore, for a feminist show.

"I think that really depends on your own definition of what feminist is - it's become such a loaded word. But what I think is undoubtedly feminist about it is that she puts female experience right at the centre and says, if you have never looked at the world through these eyes then do so now. For me, that is feminism, that it makes the female experience central."

And the poem's other halves, the long-suffering women of the great, the good and the complete pillocks of history and culture, have a debunking charm, Samuel says.

"I think Duffy painted some very perceptive portraits of male characters through the eyes of the females who know them best.

"Obviously these women love their men deeply or they wouldn't have married ... but once you know someone on that day-to-day, intimate level you're right up against the weaknesses, the doubts, the flaws, the insecurities, the self-deceptions ... as men are with women, too. No man is a hero to his wife."

* The World's Wife opens at the Maidment Theatre, Auckland University, on Tuesday. It also plays in Gisborne (September 4-5), Hastings (September 8), Invercargill (September 13), Blenheim (September 17) and Nelson (September 19-20).