Uninhibited abuse! Lisa Chappell and Adam Gardiner in Polo, Dean Parker's last play with the Auckland Theatre Company. Photo / Michael Smith
The last time Dean Parker had a play presented by the Auckland Theatre Company was 2016. It was Polo, a satire on the Auckland polo set.
Parker wasn't a fan. In a lecture in Wellington last year he talked about "the silken congealed excrescence of the entire Remuera ruling class".
The play reeked of the same sentiment, subjecting its audiences, many of whom lived in Remuera, to two hours of uninhibited abuse. Yes, there were walkouts. No, the play was not a success. No, the theatre did not perform any more of Parker's work.
He was known to be hurt. It's a little hard to think he did not see it coming.
The poet Kevin Ireland used to say it's important for the integrity of an artist that they bite the hand that feeds them. Dean Parker, who died of a heart attack last week, would have agreed.
His most famous work was Came a Hot Friday, the 1985 caper movie he co-wrote with director Ian Mune. That's the one where Billy T James plays the Tainuia Kid, an inspired village idiot who thinks he's a Mexican bandito. "Arriba!"
Remember that? Came a Hot Friday won a slew of awards, including best screenplay, and Parker himself went on to win many more. He was an Arts Foundation Laureate in 2013 [the original reference to 2010 has been corrected] and the inaugural winner of the Playmarket Award, given for significant artistic contribution to theatre.
What was that about? He never had a big stage hit and wasn't well known. But he was admired. Why?
Dean Parker was raised a working-class Irish Catholic, in Napier. The faith didn't stick but the politics did: he always said some nuns he'd known were "to the left of Lenin".
Clever at school, he claimed he would have won a major schools debating prize, "if it weren't for some smoothly superior head girl from Sacred Heart in Island Bay beating me into second place with that almost Protestant, born-to-rule assurance that Catholic ruling-class progeny have".
He never did pass up a chance to land a blow in the class war.
In London in 1969, he fell in with hippies – White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane's hymn to hallucinogens, appears to have been favourite – and also with Trotskyists and Irish Republicans. And he was exposed to radical theatre by the likes of Caryl Churchill, David Hare, Howard Brenton and Edward Bond, then having an electric impact at the Royal Court and the National Theatre.
Culture and politics, in a ferment. Back home he began writing plays for radio. In 1974 he made his stage debut at Wellington's Downstage, with Smack, a whip-smart and very edgy drama of politics, relationships and drugs. It was widely acclaimed.
He joined the Socialist Unity Party, because, he said, he feared Prime Minister Robert Muldoon was a danger to democracy and "the only ones capable of stopping him were the left-wing unions, then taking a lead from the SUP". In 1975 he helped found the Writers Guild and became a delegate to the Federation of Labour.
After Smack came another 58 plays, by the official count, plus dozens of scripts for television and film, erudite and entertaining articles in the NZ Listener, Metro, the Herald and elsewhere, and staunch contributions to Saoirse, the Irish republican magazine he produced during the Troubles.
Parker wrote about crisis moments in history, priests and sexuality, working-class heroes, political conflicts. In a play called Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Muldoon is his protagonist and he declares: "Life is ugly, brutish and short. Like me."
That was Dean Parker: a title from Yeats, a sly misquote from Thomas Hobbes, a mind filled with cultural richness, and funny.
He adapted Shakespeare's Macbeth, Dickens' Great Expectations and Kafka's The Trial, and wrote a sequel to the classic John Mulgan novel Man Alone. He also adapted Nicky Hager's The Hollow Men, about the political seediness surrounding then-National Party leader Don Brash.
He wrote for most of the TV dramas of the 1980s and 90s, often collaborating with Greg McGee: a highlight was their All Blacks v Wales telemovie Old Scores.
"Television really is the place to be," he said. "That's where the mass audience is, that's where most people get their entertainment and information." He called Outrageous Fortune this country's "best TV drama by far".
For many years Parker presented the Auckland celebration of Bloomsday, June 16, the day James Joyce fans remember Leopold Bloom, the hero of his novel Ulysses. At the Dog's Bollix pub and later at the Thirsty Dog, Parker's Bloomsday was an exuberant cabaret show starring Linn Lorkin and the Jews Brothers and special guests such as Lucy Lawless, Michael Hurst and Tom Sainsbury.
Mixing politics and art
THERE WERE rifts. Perhaps that's inevitable: politics and art don't mix easily.
Parker left the SUP, unable to reconcile party goals with the freedom he needed to invent stories. His advice: "If you're a writer who believes in social change, involve yourself with a group working for social change." But carry on writing, he said. "It will inform your work, along with your experience of love, death, hope, despair, belief and doubt."
The harder reconciliation of art and politics came with the theatres. In Britain, progressive playwrights have frequently risen to the challenges of the time – the miners' strike, the Iraq War, racism, the global financial crisis – with major works on the main stages. We rarely see that here.
Parker had directors keen to present his work. His plays addressed topical issues and contained a subtle interplay of action and ideas. Polo, not subtle at all, was an outlier.
But he never wrote a big, thrilling work, either play or TV drama: something of depth and sparkling excitement which helps us to understand some great moment of conflict.
If it was easy all the writers would do it. Dean Parker was one of very few with the knowledge and the skills, but he never worked out how. Perhaps he didn't want to.
He called himself a "spiv from Napier", but he wasn't spivvy. He met the world with a hang-dog weariness, behind which seethed that fierce sense of humour and a bright, ruthlessly inquiring mind.
He could be seen, every morning, walking from his little cottage in Ponsonby to his "writer's cell" in Trades Hall on Great North Rd. Eyes front, hair straggly, his complexion pale, mottled, Irish. Always in a faded denim shirt, sandals, a charcoal woollen overcoat when the weather turned. His computer had no modem, so he could work without distraction.
He wrote and wrote. Just this year, responding to Covid-19, he adapted Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, from 1722. Then, just days before he died, he finished adapting Albert Camus' novel The Plague as well.
He longed for a world he could not have, and it made him angry. He wanted theatre to be "our alternative Parliament, an honest place of debate, a platform like that vital to the Greeks of old". The "polo set" and all their supporters, he believed, prevented that.
He demanded a lot, and we need the people who do that. Also, he was a romantic, sustained by the dreams that filled his head. Theatre, he said, "can convince you for a night that to be alive is a gift".
Dean Parker was 72, and is survived by his companion Isabel Bown and their son, Emmet.
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