New Zealand Drama by Howard McNaughton (review)

Reviews 275 Howard McNaughton. New Zealand Drama. Twayne’s World Authors Series, 626. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981. Pp. 168. $14.95. “The first book-length study of the whole field of New Zealand dramatic literature” (Preface) is bound to raise considerable expecta­ tions. It is therefore a pleasure to see how skilfully Dr. McNaughton has maintained the sometimes difficult balance between scholarly historian and dramatic critic in this brief but serious study. The structure of New Zealand Drama is chronological. Starting with the earliest mid-nineteenth century colonial playwrights, the author gives an accurate thumbnail survey of the various periods of New Zealand playwriting. These periods usually lagged some ten or twenty years behind the contemporary European or North American fashion: the 1855 political satire billed as a “grand local, legendary, descriptive, subscriptive , serio-comic, mock-heroic, democratical, autocratical piece de circonstance” (p. 20); “The Land of the Moa,” a typical late nineteenthcentury melodrama with stereotyped American villain, Maori princess heroine, and the almost obligatory Tarawera volcanic eruption; the spectacular London West End commercial success of Merton Hodge’s “well-made” plays and other writers’ more adventurous experiments with expressionism; the rise of the amateur theater movement in the 1930’s, with their problems of “accommodating images of emergent national identity within the modest confines of one-act, one-set, low-budget production” (p. 29); and the frustrating attempts by a range of New Zealand poets in the forties, fifties, and sixties to develop the drama­ turgical skills necessary for effective theatrical writing. The first serious modem professional playwright, Brace Mason, is quite properly given a chapter to himself. Dr. McNaughton analyzes the early social realism of “The Bonds of Love” (“It is this play [in 1953] that eventually fulfills [the] demand for a New Zealand social drama, and it achieves these requirements not in a farmhouse setting, but in the dingy hotel bedroom of a Wellington prostitute” [p. 47]), the major plays on Maori themes (particularly The Pohutukawa Tree [1960] and Awatea [1969]: “Mason was the first dramatist to pass beyond the crude tourist perspective of the biracial basis of New Zealand society. The terms of Mason’s advance are not strictly realistic; they involve a search for a national poetic self-expression . . .” [p. 49]), and the series of virtuoso solo works he both wrote and performed. The critical discussion is nicely balanced between the social/thematic concerns that are bound to pre­ occupy the historian of a post-colonial culture, and the more purely dramaturgical/literary ground on which Dr. McNaughton seems most at home. Why a full chapter is devoted to plays of the poet James K. Baxter is not clear. The claim that his “patently flawed plays” and even his theatrical failure were of “remarkable importance . . . to the development of New Zealand drama” (p. 61) is not substantiated; and one of Baxter’s real theatrical contributions, the putting on stage to powerful dramatic effect of vulgar colloquial New Zealand English, is not even discussed. 276 Comparative Drama Dr. McNaughton writes extremely well about the plays of the sixties and seventies, many of which he has covered as critic for the Christchurch Press. His analysis of the dramaturgy of contemporary playwrights Robert Lord, Mervyn Thompson, Craig Harrison, Joseph Musaphia, and Roger Hall is both acute and theatrically informed. Inevitably there will be disagreements over individual critical judgments. I would argue that Roger Hall is a more serious and ambitious playwright, particularly in State of the Play, than Dr. McNaughton will allow. Nor is the New Zealand theater audience as homogeneous as is claimed; the character in Hall’s Middle-Age Spread whom Dr. McNaughton (and Wellington and presumably Christchurch audiences) would dismiss as “an unim­ aginative, reactionary accountant” (p. 145), was applauded by audiences at Auckland’s Mercury Theatre. Nevertheless, Dr. McNaughton has succeeded remarkably well in achieving a critical overview of an exces­ sively disparate subject. He has also given due credit to the importance of radio in the 1960’s and Wellington’s Downstage Theatre in the 1970’s in fostering New Zealand theater writers, as well as to the more recent work of Playmarket as a script development agency. The book provides a Chronology...