Ian Mune was in his first job out of school and a part-time amateur actor when he heard about a solo play packing out theatres. The now 83-year-old, who was knighted last year, pushed his way into an Auckland theatre and stood at the back.
“A man came on stage and he said, ‘I invite you to join me on a journey into the past, into that territory of the heart that we call childhood,’” Mune recalls. “I closed my eyes, and I kept my eyes closed all the way through it because it was so gripping.”
That man was Bruce Mason acting in his play The End of the Golden Weather, which over the years became a seminal piece of New Zealand theatre. One of our most celebrated playwrights, Mason died in 1982 aged 61, after performing his best-known work more than 500 times. The play connected Mune and Mason over the years. When Mason helped set up Wellington’s Downstage Theatre in the early 1960s, Mune was one of its first employed actors. He would go in and hold Mason’s scripts and help him prepare his lines.
Mune: “I made a couple of suggestions about moves he could make to intensify the thing and Bruce would say, ‘Oh, yes.’ Every time that Downstage was going to go broke and going to close, they’d give Bruce a ring and say, ‘Can you do two weeks of Golden Weather?’ because they knew it would pack the theatre every night. And he would. He saved the theatre two or three times a year for a few years.”
After Mune began writing and directing for the screen, he suggested to Mason the play would make a fine film. Could they co-write a script? After Mason’s death, Mune asked his widow, Diana Mason, if he could continue with those plans. “It was made in Bruce’s honour,” says Mune, of the 1991 film he directed and wrote.
Now, The End of the Golden Weather is back in Mune’s life. He’s the narrator of the Court Theatre’s production in its new Christchurch home.
The End of the Golden Weather is a memory play based on Mason’s experience of growing up in the Depression. Set in the beachfront town of Te Parenga (standing in for Takapuna) on Auckland’s North Shore in the 1930s, its main character is a nameless boy aged about 12. In the Court Theatre production of the ensemble version of the play, adapted by the late Raymond Hawthorne, and directed by Lara Macgregor, the boy is played by adult actor James Kupa (Ngāti Kahungunu).
The play focuses on the boy’s friendship with a mentally challenged Firpo (played by Gregory Cooper), who wants to run in the Olympics and challenges the local boys to a race on the beach. Over summer, the boy learns about the world’s injustices, as he prepares to move into adulthood.
Mune’s narrator is one of 10 actors on stage, with an ensemble of seven performing multiple characters. It’s his first time on stage in four years and, because it was Golden Weather, he was happy to leave his home in Kumeū, a few kilometres from the farm where he was born, to stay in Christchurch for 10 weeks.
It’s also a new twist to cast the narrator of End of the Golden Weather as a man in his 80s, which Mune thinks gives the play new meaning.
“When Bruce first did it, he was in his 30s,” Mune says. “As the narrator, he was telling the story to come to terms with the trauma of his childhood so he could go on living. Now I’m the narrator and I’m 83. My narrator is coming to terms with the trauma of his childhood so he can be prepared to die. The whole context is very different. It doesn’t stop the show being very funny and much of it very endearing. But from the narrator’s point of view, it’s an upending for him. It’s an upending but it’s complex. This ain’t simple shit.”
The cast members talk to the Listener in their lunchbreak, as workmen move around, doing final wiring on the new $61.5 million Court Theatre, which is about to open on its Gloucester St site. Since 2011, after the quakes forced the theatre out of its Arts Centre site, the company ran out of The Shed, in Addington.
Choosing a New Zealand play set on a sunny North Shore with flowering pōhutukawa to run in a South Island theatre as the leaves yellow and the air chills might seem unusual. But Court Theatre artistic co-director Alison Walls – who also plays four characters in the ensemble – says there was a need for a simple story with powerful, universal themes.
“We decided the inaugural play in the new Court Theatre had to be a classic from Aotearoa and we had to recognise our roots and theatrical strength as a country.
“Bruce Mason was at the vanguard of establishing professional theatre In New Zealand, and it felt fitting when we’re opening this purpose-built theatre to recognise our roots as we put out these new branches. We are very aware of the symbolic weight of our first show.”
Performing Hawthorne’s version “adds another layer and it’s nice to be able to recognise his legacy”, Walls says. [Raymond Hawthorne passed away, aged 88, in April.]
The actors’ rehearsal room contains a jar of sand from Takapuna Beach. The set including a deconstructed pōhutukawa tree and wharf made from whitewashed timber, representing the faded memories of the narrator’s past.
Macgregor wanted a cast representing the past, present and future of the Court Theatre. Mark Hadlow started acting there in the 1970s and has performed on its stages more than 400 times; Gregory Cooper has been part of the company for 14 years. Nick Tipa (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Hāteatea) is performing at the Court for the first time, and Macgregor hopes he’ll be part of its future. Anna McPhail is returning to the stage for the first time in 18 years as part of the ensemble playing two characters.
A drama teacher at Christchurch Girls’ College, McPhail grew up going to the Court with her parents, actor-comedian David McPhail and Anne. Near the end of her late father’s career, he moved more into stage acting and directing. About two decades ago, she played the Fool in King Lear, with David in the lead, which, she reflects, feels particularly special now since his death in 2021.
“I feel his loss really profoundly at the moment. I just want to pick up the phone and ring him and say, ‘Oh my god, Dad, this is happening.’
“It’s feeding my soul to be back. This story stands the test of time. New Zealanders all have a special place from our childhood, whether it’s a Kiwi bach or a camping spot. We learn that our parents are not immortal and we are human beings, and not perfect. It resonates because it’s about a coming of age.”
As he rehearses, Mune reflects on his own childhood growing up in Auckland. “The adults seemed to have a world that was separate from the world I tumbled around in. I knew I had to go there but I wasn’t sure that it was that attractive.”
The End of the Golden Weather, Court Theatre, Christchurch, May 3 to June 7.
