KEY POINTS:
The national psyche may have been dented by the recurring tragedy of our World Cup campaign, but this year delivered a bold affirmation of the vitality of homegrown drama.
More than half of the Auckland Theatre Company's programme was devoted to work by Kiwi playwrights and, in the smaller venues, there was abundant evidence of the quality and variety of local product.
A newcomer and an old hand led the charge. Roger Hall's new work Who Wants to Be 100? supplied all the familiar pleasures of the Hall brand, but surprised many with its bleak vision of the twilight years and hard-hitting critique of institutionalised care for the elderly.
For his theatrical debut, Geoff Chapple showed that compelling drama can be extracted from the most unlikely source material. In Hatch or the Plight of the Penguins, Chapple discovered a strange alchemy by which the business of boiling penguins was somehow transformed into a highly entertaining and thought-provoking piece of theatre.
Perhaps the year's most exciting development was the production of no less than five new works by Pacific Island writers. The plays spoke of the diversity of Pacific Island experience and avoided the familiar immigrant stories.
Tusiata Avia's wonderfully poetic Wild Dogs Under My Skirt introduced a bizarre menagerie of characters drawn from the shadowy margins of Pacific Island society, while Leilani Unasa's His Mother's Son offered a surrealistic take on cross-cultural marriage seen through the eyes of a dying man and his enigmatic spirit guide. Victor Rodger's My Name is Gary Cooper found multiple layers of irony in a witty deconstruction of the mythology surrounding the 1953 Hollywood classic Return to Paradise Beach.
In Lena, Jason Greenwood created a powerful family saga by drawing on his memories of pre-independence Samoa, while Maree Webster's Uli Vao provided a neat inversion of the immigrant narrative by following a group of New Zealand-born Niueans as they journey to the homeland.
One senses that Pacific Island theatre is on the threshold of the kind of creative explosion Maori theatre experienced during the 1990s.
Auckland writers have benefited from the excellent script reading programmes run by the Herald Theatre and the Auckland Theatre Company, but what to do with all these new works remains a problem.
Playwrights have always thrived in the democratic bustle of a competitive market place but a lack of suitable venues coupled with Creative New Zealand's deeply entrenched bias towards funding Wellington theatre means producers are forced into the notoriously difficult enterprise of picking winners from on high.
On the international front, 2007 was a vintage year. By touring Sir Ian McKellen in King Lear, the Royal Shakespeare Company gave us a startling glimpse of the Grey Wizard's wand and demonstrated Shakespeare can deliver an international blockbuster without any compromise on artistic quality. The year will also be remembered for a belated visit by the legendary Topol in Fiddler on the Roof and Miriam Margolyes' engaging exploration of Dickens' Women.
My list of outstanding local productions would include the grungy and gutsy version of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming at the Herald Theatre, Colin McColl's production of The Crucible - which provided a timely reminder of the danger of witch-hunts - and Tanemahuta Gray's aerial take on Maui, which found a theatrical vocabulary commensurate with demands of presenting mythological stories. Exceptional performances were almost too numerous to mention and every theatre-goer will have their own list. For me, the stand-outs would include the coupling of Michael Lawrence and Eddie Campbell in The Homecoming; Stuart Devenie's virtuoso display in Hatch; Peter Daube's restrained and dignified performance in The Crucible; George Henare's haunting evocation of Alzheimer's in Who Wants to Be 100?; Craig Parker for somehow maintaining an air of innocence amid the depravity of The Pillowman; and Paul Barrett's nuanced portrayal of a Judy Garland devotee in End of the Rainbow.
