06-07-2025
Why do so many New Zealand plays have such short lives?
Playwright Sam Brooks on the importance of looking back to move forward.
Theatre is an ephemeral art form. That's the beauty of it. For an hour or two, the performance exists for the people who are in the same room as it, and then it goes away. The next night, the same actors might say the same lines in the same places, but it's still different. It's never the exact same thing. Then the play closes, and it goes away.
Sometimes, it goes away forever. Whether it happened at a tiny fringe venue or a massive stage, there are plays that are one-and-done, for whatever reason. That's especially true in New Zealand, which unfortunately lacks a culture of revival, or revisiting shows.
Reviving a show is something that the average theatregoer might be aware of without knowing the exact definition. Essentially, it's the practice of putting on a show again after its premiere run, with a completely new team and interpretation. The recent production of Black Faggot that played at Christchurch's Court Theatre and then Q Theatre is a revival of the 2013 production, for example, with none of the same creative team. That's meaningfully distinct from, say, Silo Theatre's upcoming production of Mother Play – while it might be a New Zealand premiere, it is a completely new production.
Other countries, particularly those with strong theatregoing traditions, have much stronger revival cultures. Shows get enshrined into the canon and have new productions, and new interpretations of them produced regularly, with people often showing up in droves. For example: If you're a certain brand of homosexual, you'll have strong opinions on Audra McDonald's take on Gypsy's protagonist Gypsy Rose Lee compared to Patti LuPone's take, compared to Bernadette Peters', and so on. If that meant nothing to you, sub in 'All Blacks kicker' for 'Gypsy Rose Lee', 'Dan Carter' for 'Audra McDonald', 'Beauden Barrett' for Patti LuPone', and 'Andrew Mehrtens' for 'Bernadette Peters' (apologies to both fans of musical theatre and the ABs).
This is the kind of thing that doesn't happen here, even for international plays. There have been two professional productions of A Streetcar Named Desire in Auckland in my lifetime, for example, which means two chances for me, and any Auckland theatregoer, to see one of the most acclaimed plays of all time.
New Zealand, simply put, does not have that same culture of revival – especially when it comes to our own 'canon'. Once a play is performed, it often exists for its initial season and very rarely again.
There are a few reasons for that. The relative youth of playwriting in this country is one of those – Roger Hall's Glide Time is widely regarded as the turning point for audiences recognising that New Zealand could generate its own theatre is only 50 years old, and even the grandfather of New Zealand theatre, End of the Golden Weather, is just 75 years old. (That one was actually revived earlier this year, as the show that opened Christchurch's Court Theatre's new venue.)
The worldwide theatre canon is hundreds, even thousands of years old. Compared to that, our canon may as well be a catalogue – and I might say that our best plays hold their own on the world stage with theatre cultures older and better supported. This same thinking has also historically been applied to basically anything New Zealand has succeeded at, but I promise it is also true of theatre.
We also have a culture of making, and developing, new work. We develop, we produce, we premiere and we move on. Premiere productions being performed only once is an issue that extends beyond the cultural to the commercial – getting funding for a new work is easy, for whatever reason, but increasingly difficult for subsequent remounts. It does mean, however, that there are absolute diamonds that exist for one moment of brilliance, remembered by only those who saw them, before dipping into the archives, with only the most nerdy theatre people remembering they existed. (I think of work like Silo Theatre's Cellfish, and Miria George's and what remains as works that feel even more relevant now than when they premiered.)
There is also a lack of access, for commercial reasons. We are a small country where theatre is often vying for funding against art forms with deeper roots, which means less money is available for venues to stay open, companies to develop and produce theatre, and even for playwrights to write them. With perhaps a little bit too much transparency: of the 53 plays I've written, I have been commissioned to write once, and received funding from Creative New Zealand to write two of these. The rest have been written under my own steam. In short: Less money means less art, less art being made means less art being seen, means less art in the canon.
That access extends to it being difficult to find and read scripts in the first place. Places like Unity and second-hand bookstores might have a play section, but very rarely will you find New Zealand plays there. Similarly, libraries might have a resource, but while a great many New Zealand plays have been published, they are more representative of our canon than they are entirely reflective. Playmarket, New Zealand's playwriting agency, is a great resource for New Zealand work if it takes your fancy!
Also? Reading a play – and I say this in earnest as someone who both writes and reads plays – is not the most interesting thing. It's a very different thing to imagine the world of a play in your mind compared to, say, imagining the world of a novel. Plays are often written for enthusiasts and experts to read and interpret, not for a general audience. They're less like books and more like blueprints.
A play isn't like a book. It's not a song. It's not like a movie – even in the rare case when a play is filmed, it's no substitute for actually being there. Once those things are produced, they exist. If they're lucky enough to be a part of the canon, they're enshrined in perpetuity.
Plays are a different beast. 'You had to be there' is tragically real – for a play if you actually weren't there for the premiere production, there's a very real chance that you might have missed it.
This week at Auckland's Basement Theatre, I've been fortunate enough to be asked to curate a series of playreadings called Firing the Canon, which will involve five plays being performed for free, with 37 actors, emerging and experienced, performing across the week. These five include the aforementioned Glide Time by Roger Hall (marking his Basement Theatre debut), Smashed by Tawhi Thomas, Rēwena by Whiti Hereaka, The Packer by Dianna Fuemana and Cow by Jo Randerson. The goal is for the series to run long-term, in venues across the country, and to breathe new life into plays that might otherwise not be performed, for any of the above reasons.
There's no way I can cover the huge spectrum of New Zealand theatre with only five plays. I couldn't even do it with 50. But it's a little bit of a light shone in the right direction. Our theatre history might not be as huge as the UK's, or the USA's, but it's pretty mighty. But without an audience showing up, an audience taking interest, it might not be there at all. Theatre is an ephemeral form, but when an audience shows up, it can feel eternal.
