The End of the Golden Weather

The End

of the Golden

Weather

A voyage into a

New Zealand childhood

by Bruce Mason

Victoria University Press

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Victoria University of Wellington

PO Box 600 Wellington

http://www.vup.vuw.ac.nz

© Bruce Mason estate 1962, 1970

ISBN 0 86473 272 4

First published in 1962

This edition revised and reset in 1970

Reprinted 1974, 1981, 1994, 1998

Permission to perform this play must be obtained from Playmarket,

PO Box 9767, Courtenay Place, Wellington, New Zealand.

The publishers acknowledge the assistance and advice

of Playmarket, which was established in 1973 to

provide services for New Zealand playwrights.

This book is copyright. Apart from

any fair dealing for the purpose of private study,

research, criticism or review, as permitted under the

Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any

process without the permission of

the publishers

Cover design by Graham Percy

Ebook production 2011 by meBooks

To B.C.

Deer stalker, friend

Note to the second edition

About a year ago, I was invited by the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation to prepare a television programme to celebrate the 500th performance of The End of the Golden Weather; it reached the screen in another form, and was shown on all channels in the Looking at New Zealand series on Sunday, 14 September, 1969, directed by John Barningham and produced by Bute Hewes. My original TV script gives a fuller account of the experience, and I offer it here, exactly as it was submitted, omitting only technical terms of the TV trade.

AUTHOR can be seen advancing to table and chair; unseen applause. Bow.

AUTHOR. 'I invite you to join me, in a voyage into the past, to that territory of the heart we call childhood. …'

Camera recedes, showing AUTHOR mumbling on a TV screen; voice fades to murmur, as he says:

'Consider, if you will, Te Parenga. …'

He drones on, behind the montage of press clippings, reviews, the published text, the two record covers. Camera now reveals a studio, the AUTHOR and INTERVIEWER, facing each other.

TITLES : The Golden Weather Odyssey, or Fleecings from the Golden Weather, by Bruce Mason.

INTERVIEWER. The End of the Golden Weather. How many times now?

AUTHOR. I lost count after 500.

INTERVIEWER. Almost a way of life.

AUTHOR. Almost.

INTERVIEWER. You must have asked yourself: will it ever end?

AUTHOR. I still do it: between thirty and fifty performances every year.

INTERVIEWER. And you never tire of it?

AUTHOR. Never. You see I've no aids at all. Table, chair, voice, gesture. Nothing else. So it has to be re-created on the spot, every time. Every audience is different; every audience a new challenge.

INTERVIEWER. And you've taken it everywhere.

AUTHOR. You name it: I've played it.

INTERVIEWER. Blenheim.

AUTHOR. No.

INTERVIEWER. Alexandra.

AUTHOR. No. You've picked the only two. But everywhere else, of any size. Every city, town, village, hamlet, petrol-station, it sometimes seems.

INTERVIEWER. How did it all begin?

AUTHOR. Well, in 1959, I'd come to the end of a road. I'd written a few plays, assembled a mountain of criticism, done some producing. I'd had a crack at all the arts and trades of theatre. But it hadn't got me anywhere.

INTERVIEWER. Where did you want to get?

AUTHOR. I just wanted to feel that I had a calling for theatre and that this calling would at length be recognised, so that I could give my life and best energies to it. But you can't work in a vacuum. A man won't write symphonies, if there's no orchestra to play them. There was no solid theatrical framework here, no ladder to climb so that, feet on the the first rung, you could go upwards to the second. You created no mana, no reputation or authority to justify your work. In fact, to most people, it wasn't work at all, just pretentious frivolity.

INTERVIEWER. What about the New Zealand Players?

AUTHOR. A flash in the pan, alas, though a flash that lasted for seven years.

INTERVIEWER. But didn't you write for them?

AUTHOR. Yes. Sketches and pieces for their Schools' Quartets and one full-length play, which has become my best-known: The Pohutukawa Tree. But at no stage could I consider that this was opening up a career. It was always and only, a spare-time job. Hence the desperation.

INTERVIEWER. And? So?

AUTHOR. Well, I'm a Kiwi, born and bred. We're at our best in a corner: good improvisers, bad experts, as an American critic once said of us. No theatrical framework? Right, then, I would create my own. Touring a play is expensive? Then cut to the minimum, table and chair. Scenery is costly to make and cumbersome to cart around? Do it all with words: appeal directly to the audience's imagination. Casts are expensive? Be your own. Do all forty parts. Play anywhere, in any circumstances, to any audience.

INTERVIEWER. You take my breath away.

AUTHOR. I almost took my own away.

INTERVIEWER. But how much experience did you have for this?

AUTHOR. Very little; none, of solo theatre.

INTERVIEWER. Aren't I right in saying that there are only about six people in the entire English-speaking world who have the—

AUTHOR. Effrontery is the word that eludes you.

INTERVIEWER. All right, effrontery, to dare to hold an audience on their speaking voice alone?

AUTHOR. Yes, and I can name them. Hal Holbrook, who does Mark Twain. Joyce Grenfell, though she sings also, Sir John Gielgud with his Shakespeare recital, The Ages of Man, Orson Welles from time to time, with this and that, Micheal McLiammoir with The Importance of Being Oscar (Wilde), Emlyn Williams, with his Dickens and Dylan Thomas evenings.…

INTERVIEWER. Yes, he visited New Zealand in 1958, with both programmes.

AUTHOR. I went to see them, and saw what could be done. I wrote to Mr Williams, and asked if I could meet him and tell him what I had in mind.

INTERVIEWER. What did he say?

AUTHOR. I think he was stupefied by my audacity. He said something like this. That he had been thirty years in the professional theatre, both as an actor and as a playwright. His Night Must Fall and The Corn is Green had both had lengthy runs on the stage, in England and America, both had been made into successful films, with top stars. Yet when in 1950, he asked his management, H. M. Tennent Ltd., the most prosperous in London, to arrange and present a solo evening of Dickens readings for him, they were dubious almost to hostility; finally, at his insistence, they agreed to give him a Sunday-night try-out in Cambridge. And remember, he said to me, I wasn't proposing to stand on my own reputation alone; I stood on Dickens' shoulders, and later, on Dylan Thomas'. Yet here, litde you, at the backyard of the world, dare to assume that you can not only hold an audience oy yourself, but you write your own script as well! Wew, there's nothing to do but wish you luck.

INTERVIEWER. Were you dashed by this?

AUTHOR. A bit, but there was nothing to do but try. I had a few advantages, negative ones, but important. I didn't have to