Canterbury’s Court Theatre has just opened its spiffing new building with a production of Bruce Mason’s The End of the Golden Weather. It’s an iconic New Zealand performance piece.
Witten as a novella, The End of the Golden Weather is set at a mythical Kiwi beach in Auckland during the Depression of the 1930s. It’s the story of a boy growing up and coming of age and witnessing his community and family cope with hard times in an idyllic place. It’s also the story of a loner called Firpo, who dreams of success by running in the Olympic Games – a delusion, but for a moment he becomes a hero in the boy’s eyes.
Mason wrote the piece in the 1950s and then toured the country performing it solo. The first time he did that was in 1959. He went on to perform it more than a 1000 times in community halls the length and breadth of the country. It was made into a film in 1991 by Ian Mune.
The recently deceased Raymond Hawthorne fashioned it into a piece for a theatre company in the ’80s. But that was not the first time a company performed it. That honour belongs to a school production by Auckland Grammar and Epsom Girls Grammar in 1980.
I know because I was in it. I was Firpo. I was 17.
Freda Mitchinson from EGGS was the architect, with help from John Heyes at Grammar. Their ambition was spurred on by the success of the previous year’s production of Death of a Salesman, which featured knock-out performances from kids who went on to make names for themselves. Simon Prast was Willie Loman, Rima Te Wiata the scarlet lady (aka The Woman) and Finlay MacDonald, later Listener editor, played Happy.
We had a narrator, a boy called Tim, but that’s all I remember. He was very good. He was our Bruce Mason. The boy at the heart of it was played by Andrew Laxon, a fourth former at the time. He’s now a senior member of staff at the Herald. His character was an allegory of New Zealand coming of age. He was sweet and confused at the growing comprehension of adult life that was coming at him like a train. Miss Effie Brent was played by Liz Mullane, who became the New Zealand casting director for The Lord of the Rings.
And me.
The scripts were the books that we were all issued with. Our lines underscored with pencils, and our annotations in the margins. A lot of the stage direction was verbal, and we just had to remember it.
The real genius of the production was the design in the Centennial Theatre. Much of the tale is recalled as memory. Later productions handle the shift from the present to past with lighting colour changes – golden yellowy lighting for memories.
In 1980 we masked half the stage with a wall of muslin. When the lights were in front of it, it was a wall. When the lights were brought up behind it, the scenes became visible through a gauzy haze. No one has tried that since. It was magic.
Our production was dark. We included the 1932 Auckland riots, something the film omitted. Firpo was deeply challenged mentally. The picture here is my only photographic evidence of the role, taken from the audience with a Kodak Instamatic. Alone in a spotlight screaming the “Made Man” monologue at the heart of the character; I was shocked by my own intensity and the flying spittle. I had never wailed like that in real life, I was subsumed.
Bruce Mason himself came to see the final dress rehearsal, only two years from his death and ravaged by a stroke. He died before the Raymond Hawthorne production, so this was the only time Mason saw his creation as a play with a full company. I remember him watching silently with his half-collapsed face. He said nothing because he could not say anything, but we were told he enjoyed it.
I am immensely proud of the production, its ambition and how it formed me. It was then I realised I had a performance gene, which later came out in my radio career.
A girl called Helen Wild played the psychologist who committed Firpo to an asylum. She became my girlfriend and later the mother of my children. We’re still together 45 years on, and we still joke that she committed me, once upon a time.
I don’t know whether schools take production risks the way the two grammars did back in the day. We would do a Gilbert and Sullivan for mass participation and general snogging but then put a serious drama on later in the year. It was the serious drama that forged and inspired the actors like Simon Prast and Rima Te Wiata to embark upon their journeys in drama.
It’s a reminder that kids don’t need to be cosseted. Kids grow when challenged. Pressure makes diamonds. We can all become a Made Man.
Andrew Dickens is a NZME radio host.
