Online exclusive
It’s rare for a playwright to get the opportunity to write a sequel to their play, even if the first one was sold out before opening night.
Then again, Stuart McKenzie and Miranda Harcourt come with name recognition as much as for their own writing, directing and acting – and in Miranda’s case, coaching a long list of Hollywood stars – as for their children’s achievements.
Daughter Thomasin is established as a bona fide international film star, younger sister, Davida, is following in her highly accomplished footsteps and brother Peter is a successful journalist.
McKenzie and Harcourt wrote and directed Transmission in 2021 and New Zealand was on a high from supposedly “beating” the Covid-19 virus that caused a global pandemic. Three years later, they are following that production with Transmission: Beta.
It is set in an entirely different environment – where Covid is endemic, and NZ’s efforts to eradicate it fractured society and led to former prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s downfall. As pioneers of verbatim theatre – where the words of real people are spoken by actors in a play made up of this dialogue – through Transmission: Beta, McKenzie and Harcourt are looking at what went wrong.
It features the words of politicians like Ardern, Grant Roberston and John Tamihere, economist Bernard Hickey, scientists Kjesten Wiig and Michael Baker, philanthropist Sam Morgan, police, those who did a spell in MIQ, medical practitioners and anti-mandate protesters.
Why did you make Transmission and now Transmission: Beta?
MH: Because it’s such, good strong drama. We came back from London in 2020, on the day that New Zealand was closing its borders, so we only got back by the skin of our teeth. We saw Michael Baker being interviewed and, obviously, Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson grappling with the biggest decision of the day and of their careers.
We went, “that’s drama, that’s conflict” and that is what we like to base our work around.
Like everybody else, we were anxious, and we wanted to be active, to do something. Stuart said, “well, here we are in New Zealand where you can basically connect with anybody, so I’m going to look further into this”. It was empowering to be able to explore what was happening in our nation.
SM: Transmission was first performed in Wellington, and it was going up to the Auckland Arts Festival at the beginning of 2022, but that more or less closed down because of the Omicron wave in the community.
We had thought, like many other people, “Oh well, the virus has been conquered! Yay! Five million of us have tried and won”, but it became clear that events – the story – were still unfolding so, Miranda said, “Why not make a sequel?” Because it wasn’t like they all lived happily ever after. We could see the social fabric start to pull apart.
You were interviewing people who were incredibly busy. Were they generous with their time?
SM: They were so generous. Obviously we could talk to them only when they had the bandwidth to do so, so we worked around their schedules. In a funny sort of way, I think they welcomed the opportunity to speak as a way of working things out – which is not to claim they needed us to work things out – but I think they found it an interesting process.
MH: Jacinda was puzzled as to why we might like to talk about her babysitting arrangements, but it is moments like that that show the very real human aspect to all this. It is something that the audience really connects with.
While you are translating exactly what a person said, those words can be “sliced and diced” in various ways. How do you guard against taking words out of context?
SM: That’s about building trust, that those who spoke to us would trust us to reflect what they were saying, trust our integrity, our sense of humour and our sense of humanity.
MH: And people could also always have had said no to Stuart and that they didn’t want to be interviewed. It was the same when we first did this [kind of] work in the prison system. Each person always had the power to say no, but we knew if they agreed then they were trusting us to represent them in a way that was fair. That is a heavy responsibility.
SM: It is a big responsibility, and a damn good question because you can change the meaning of something somebody said by the way you put words together but we’re not trying to throw anyone under a bus. We are trying to examine something that we all went through, but it is still a theatre show.
So, you live with the words and start to pick up on certain themes, to see what resonates and brings people together and what causes conflict. You put things together as if it is dialogue so there’s an active kind of rebuttal of ideas and more exchanges. It is drama and it follows those kind of dramatic principles, but always with a sense of responsibility and trust.
Then we show them the scenes that they’re in, so that they can come and say, “oh, you know, that didn’t happen like that other person is saying there” and we can work with that input, too.
For Transmission, you talked to a lot of authority figures, but for Transmission: Beta did you include protesters and those who disagreed with things like vaccination mandates?
SM: We interviewed people who took part in the protests, who were “anti-mandate” and “anti vax”, so their voices are there and in a very human way. They had to trust us to talk to us in the first place. I did reach out to some people who said, “No, I just don’t feel my words will be properly used, they’ll be taken out of context.”
The people on the fieriest end of the spectrum would often drift away, but we got people who were willing to talk and set out very clearly what they believed and why they took part in the protests.
Did it make you feel more understanding of those views, more compassionate towards the people who hold them?
SM: Yes. There was a lot of judgment on both sides. Actually, you can’t even say both sides because there were so many sides, so many parts and angles. It was all judgment. It is interesting, because when you just start talking to people, you hear their stories and get a greater sense of where they’ve come from and why they hold the opinions that they do.
Has there been any blowback yet?
MH: No, not yet, but we haven’t opened the show yet. I am absolutely sure we will get some; we’ve got our publicist keeping us updated with the response on social media. We’ve already had, in response to the Facebook advertising, people who are sure this is part of “the conspiracy” and then responses from others who disagree.
SM: It’s a roiling mess of conflict, which is something we’re trying to lift up; the conflict and the disharmony that we all experienced. We want to look at it in a new light by making something that goes across the spectrum of human emotion. Just as there are poignant moments, there is humour.
A lot of the debate that could happen will be from people whose minds are already made up on one end of the spectrum or the other. But the show is not like that. It is surprising and unexpected, and you get to meet some humans and the thing about humans is that we’re always much more interesting and complex and thoughtful than might first appear.
Miranda, much of your work is now on international film productions, which sounds rather more glamorous than theatre. Why do you want to go back and do theatre?
MH: Doing theatre work is like gardening, where you’re getting your hands into the soil and that’s very rewarding. It all feeds back into the “glamour coaching”, which I’m often doing – via Zoom – at 5am. The legacy, for me, of the pandemic is that now pyjamas have become fashion wear!
Transmission: Beta is at Wellington’s Circa One Theatre, May 18 - June 15.
