KEY POINTS:
Performer Jonny Brugh has played cricket - in the backyard, on the street and at club level - for three decades but it was just two years ago that he heard a story that bowled him over.
Brugh's friend and former flatmate, musician Steve Abel, told him about
the New Zealand cricket team's 1953 tour to South Africa and the bravery of young cricketer Bob Blair, who turned out to bat after learning his bride-to-be had perished in the Tangiwai rail disaster.
Moved by the tale, Brugh has combined his day job as an actor-writer with his love of cricket to develop the one-person show 1953, based on Blair's story.
The year was a defining one for New Zealand in many respects: Sir Ed climbed Mt Everest in May, the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II visited the country and, in December, the New Zealand cricket team were in South Africa after a six-week sea voyage.
The team weren't winning many games but the young players were having a rollicking time, enthusiastically welcomed wherever they visited. Then on Christmas morning, news started filtering through of a terrible tragedy back home.
Twenty-four hours later it was confirmed that on Christmas Eve, 151 people had died in the Tangiwai train disaster. Bob Blair, a 22-year-old fast bowler from Wellington, received the news that his fiancee, 19-year-old Narissa Love, was among those killed. Her body was never found.
While the team went out to face a fired-up South African test side, Blair stayed behind at the hotel but made an unexpected appearance later that day. With his side on a losing streak, he walked out to bat - arm in arm with injured batsman Bert Sutcliffe. The entire crowd, many in tears, stood to give the men a standing ovation.
"As soon as Steve told me the story, I thought it needed to be on stage," says Brugh. "It had all the elements which make for good theatre - humanity and heroism among them."
Director Andrew Foster agrees: "It really is a coming-of-age story for New Zealand. Our cricket team didn't win this particular game but that's not the point. The heroism, the courage, was in a nation being brought together as one by the actions of a brave individual."
1953 is unlike anything Brugh has worked on previously. As one half of the comedy duo Sugar & Spice, he made his name as a funnyman. In 2003, his solo show The Fall and Rise or The Rise And Fall of Dinky Jon saw him catapulting watermelons at the stage walls and flying above the audience hanging from a rail. He topped that by donning leather and latex for the satirical My Brother and I are Porn Stars.
But Brugh describes himself as a versatile performer willing to step outside his comfort zone to tell a true, more serious story. He feels a degree of responsibility to portray events accurately and sensitively, as demonstrated by the research he has undertaken.
He has read numerous newspaper reports and novels about the Tangiwai tragedy and the 1953 cricket tour, watched television documentaries and interviewed various individuals. Hopes are high he can access the diaries of one of the players and use 8mm footage shot during the tour and not seen publicly before.
"It's the first time I've told a true story, which is great," Brugh says. "I don't have to worry about coming up with ideas because the story already exists and I have it to fall back on.
"I am sure there will be people who see the show and think, 'That's not quite right', but what I'm trying to be true to is the sentiment involved, the essential humanness at the heart of it."
He and Foster have had numerous discussions about how technical they need to be about cricket and how one performer can portray an entire game complete with a watching crowd. Some of those issues are still being worked out, which, say Foster and Brugh, is largely the aim of the exercise.
"The only way to find out what people think and how the show is progressing is to try the story out in front of an audience," says Brugh.
He would one day like to perform the show in Johannesburg, where the 1953 New Zealand cricket team played its famous match.
* 1953 plays at the Pumphouse, Takapuna, from Wednesday to February 28.
