Robyn Malcolm is best known for her long-running roles on New Zealand television – Ellen Crozier on Shortland Street and Cheryl West on Outrageous Fortune. There have been memorable shorter ones too, like the lead in real estate comedy-drama Agent Anna and Heather in this year’s Far North, as well as regular roles across the Tasman and in American shows like Black Bird and Sweet Tooth.
Now, in After the Party, her second local mini-series for 2023, Malcolm is Penny, a woman whose life has unravelled since she accused her husband of doing something unthinkable. We first meet her as the disarmingly frank teacher at a Wellington boys’ high school.
“So, you meet Penny, and you go, ‘Okay, well, she’s fun,’” explains Malcolm. “She’s also really fucking annoying, and you go, ‘I don’t know if I like her or not.’”
Malcolm would know, having co-created the six-part drama with screenwriter Dianne Taylor. The pair had the basis of Penny, a middle-aged woman to be played by Malcolm, long before they had a story.
It’s not unusual for the first episode of a TV drama to be dense with plot. The opener of After the Party is a little different: it’s dense with character. So much so that when Penny engages in a risky and unexpected act of environmental activism, it doesn’t matter that we haven’t built up to it, or even that it’s not really part of the main story. It’s just clearly the kind of thing this woman would do. Penny is flesh-and-blood believably someone who would – and does – turn her own life upside down.
The fact that she might plausibly do so with either good cause or needlessly is the foundation of the story. Her husband Phil, played by Scottish actor Peter Mullan, who Malcolm met on Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake (gossip columns breathlessly reported a “romantic fling” between them), is Penny’s ex-husband and he’s back from exile. He’s warm and level-headed and, according to Penny, did something awful that led to their separation five years earlier. He wishes she’d move on and so does their daughter, Grace (played by impressive newcomer Tara Canton).
Is Penny being gaslit or is she really just mad and difficult?
“That’s the thread that we have held all the way through it. It holds the tension,” says Taylor. “One of the trickier parts of developing the plot was to maintain that tension. Where are we now? Are we Team Penny or Team Phil?”
In an industry where writers are asked to work quickly – especially in New Zealand, where the whakapapa of screen drama lies in the fast turnarounds of Shortland Street – the pair worked on theirs for a long time before anyone else got a look.
“We spent a huge amount of time talking about the people, building up the 30 years before we meet them – and not just the bits of them that are hooked into the plot,” says Malcolm. “Di was able to write and write and write and I could go off and be an actor, and then we could come together and sit – and we involved nobody for nearly two years.”
“It comes back to having that time,” says Taylor. “You’re not having to perform in a writers’ room. You’re not having to be the one with the snippy-snappy answer, you can let it sit and have a bit of a think about it. I think that worked well for us.”
The pair’s initial script found a ready reception at Australian company Lingo Pictures, makers of the Tim Minchin series Upright and the acclaimed Lambs of God, and where its managing director is expatriate Kiwi Helen Bowden.
The budget was bolstered by Covid stimulus money, 3 of its 6 episodes were written by Sam Shore, Martha Hardy-Ward and Emily Perkins and the new series was directed by veteran Peter Salmon. He has directed Malcolm before, on Outrageous Fortune and Agent Anna. The show, which also features Dean O’Gorman, Mia Blake, Tanea Heke, and Elz Carrad (Rūrangi) has been picked up by TVNZ, the ABC in Australia and has international distribution via the UK’s ITV Studios.
One other thing Penny does was also established before there was a plot for After the Party. She’s a life-drawing model and she is naked in every episode. That came out of the event that brought the pair together to write in the first place – Malcolm missing out on a film part Taylor had written, in favour of a younger actress. (The film was Beyond the Known World, the 2017 NZ-Indian production about a Kiwi couple trying to find their daughter on the Himalayan hippie trail. It, too, disappeared without trace.)
“When we got together we said, bugger it, let’s write something that cannot be cast younger, because the fact of it physically being a middle-aged woman will be an absolutely intrinsic part of the story,” says Taylor. “In many ways, that was our absolute starting point.”
Ironically, one authentic-feeling part of the woman they created wasn’t written at all. In the course of shooting Penny’s protest action (where the character does herself more than one injury), Malcolm ruptured a ligament in her knee.
“I was being wheelchaired from scene to scene at one point,” she recalls. “The beautiful [fellow actor] Loren Taylor was on set one day and she said, ‘It’s a gift.’ And I went, ‘It’s a pretty fucking sore gift.’ And she said, ‘Whatever, just use it.’
“What’s glorious is people who’ve seen it saying, ‘Oh my God, the choice to give Penny a limp was genius.’ And you’re really tempted to go, ‘Thanks very much, yeah, that was a genius piece of writing on Di’s part …’”
Having created a compelling, genuinely substantial lead character, Malcolm and Taylor have already said goodbye to her. They confirm that their story is not one that lends itself to a second season. Penny marks another memorable role for Malcolm, but maybe an atypical one.
“I had so much to do with the creation of Penny, yet one of my sisters who came to the screening said, ‘Usually I can see you in your characters,’” says Malcolm. “Like, even Cheryl West, or even the character in Black Bird with the Chicago accent. And she said, ‘I couldn’t see you in this.’ Which I thought was really weird. I expected it to be the reverse.”
Watch After the Party on TVNZ 1, Sunday, 8.30pm; TVNZ+
