The Songmaker's Chair: at Maidment Theatre

By MICHELE HEWITSON

If you are at the opening night of The Songmaker's Chair at the Maidment Theatre on Saturday and notice a rather agitated man in the seat next to you, do not call the usher. The wriggler will be the play's nervous author, Albert Wendt.

He will turn up to tomorrow's preview but will probably "just stay a short while. I'll sit at the back."

But he knows he will have to sit through the full two hours and 45 minutes on the night the play premieres. While the audience watches his play, he will be watching their responses.

At home in Ponsonby, in bare feet and denim jacket, he is tense about the prospect of watching you watching his first full-length play unfold. His feet drum on the floorboards. He grimaces.

It's not like writing a novel, says Wendt. "If people don't like the book they can curse it at home. But the reaction to a play is public."

Writing novels is what he is best known for. He also writes poetry and has taken up painting again after abandoning it years ago. On the walls of his house are some of Wendt's works and those of his mates, Ralph Hotere and John Pule. He jokes that they are his children's inheritance. He says, wryly, that "writing doesn't pay".

It is with almost as much relief as nervousness that Wendt will see his play staged. It has been a long time in the making. His work usually is. If he ever sat down and worked out his hourly rate he might never sit down to write again.

His novel The Mango's Kiss took him 16 years to write. A long verse novel has been under way for almost as long. The sequel to Black Rainbow has been sitting on his desk for five years. He re-read it, decided "half of it was awful", so will rewrite it.

The Songmaker's Chair is the result of a promise Wendt made to his cousin, actor Nathaniel Lees, "a long time ago". Wendt wrote the first draft in a few days in 1988. It had to wait until 1996 for its first reading, at a workshop at Downstage in Wellington. Then Wendt "rewrote it again, and rewrote it again".

He finally sent the much-revised draft to the Auckland Theatre Company on the advice of Lees. "It was partly to test them out: whether they were good on Pacific theatre."

It was given another reading, underwent yet another rewrite and spent some time in the company of the script doctor, dramaturge Murray Edmond.

In the interim, Auckland was planning AK03, the city's first arts festival. Wendt is on the board of trustees. Simon Prast left ATC to become the festival's director. A play about an Auckland family seemed to have been written to fit the festival bill.

Finally Lees has his play. He plays the patriarch, Peseola Olaga. And he directs. Who could blame him for wanting to maximise the opportunity? He has been waiting a long time for his play.

The story behind The Songmaker's Chair has been with Wendt for even longer. He has carried with him an image of his father, sitting in a chair in the family home in Samoa, listening to a large radio.

The play opens with the Peseola Olaga in his chair, listening to a CD of choir music. As a young man Wendt's father trained choirs in Samoa.

He says he doesn't consciously set out to always write male characters who owe quite a lot to his father but, "people in my family say 'that's your dad'. And I say, 'no, it's not'. Then I re-read the book." Wendt's father was "a frustrated musician, very creative but very practical". Faced with poverty and nine children to raise, he set up a plumbing business "which he devoted most of his life to at the cost of his music".

In the play, Peseola Olaga comes to New Zealand "and cannot be the songmaker that his father was in Samoa. And his grandson is now at university studying music."

The memory of his mother, who died when Wendt was 14 and at boarding school in New Plymouth, also informs the script. It's a funny thing, says Wendt. "She's becoming clear to me. For a very long time I couldn't even figure out what her voice was like, but now I'm beginning to hear her."

The play is set in a house over a weekend - in Wendt's mind the house is in Wellington St, Freemans Bay, where he spent school holidays with an uncle and aunt.

The family has been called together by Peseola Olaga. "And when you put a family together conflicts come out, people start choosing sides. But I think despite that, the family holds together."

This family could be any migrant family, says Wendt. Their story - the parents who arrive in the 1950s from Samoa, their children marry into Pakeha and Maori families - "reflects the migrant experience of most families, whether they come from Europe, Asia, whatever".

Wendt came to New Zealand to study, had a stint teaching at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, and returned to New Zealand in 1987. He is a professor of English at the University of Auckland and in the middle of next year will take up a two-year "Citizen's Chair" at the University of Hawaii.

He has never been able to write full time. In Hawaii he will have light teaching duties and will, perhaps, be able to break his habit of waking up at half past two every morning to think, read, or get up, put the heaters on and start writing.

He is rather excited about the prospect. First though, there is the little matter of opening-night nerves to deal with.


Performance:
* What: The Songmaker's Chair

* Where and when: Maidment Theatre, previews tomorrow and Thursday; then Sept 13-27