Tim Bray (right) is facing the battle of his life, with the unwavering support of long-time partner Bryce Hatton. Photo / Michael Craig
Tim Bray (right) is facing the battle of his life, with the unwavering support of long-time partner Bryce Hatton. Photo / Michael Craig
Still reeling from his cancer diagnosis, children’s theatre founder Tim Bray talks about the joy of living a life filled with magic.
The awful realisation of the truth about Santa came relatively late to Tim Bray, who was 8 or 9 at the time.
“That’s it?” he remembers thinking. “Youmean to tell me there’s no magic in the world? What I see is what I get?”
More than five decades later, he’s still living as though that’s not true, for whatever time he has left.
“I think that’s why I love what I do, because it keeps putting the magic back into the world,” he says, speaking publicly for the first time since being diagnosed with an extremely rare form of cancer.
“There is imagination and there are other worlds if we choose to believe in them.”
This Christmas is about endings for Bray, whose North Shore children’s theatre company will go dark after 33 years when his final production, The Santa Claus Show ‘24, closes on December 22.
His own future is less certain. The discovery of a large mass in his abdomen came out of the blue and Bray’s condition is so unusual that the medical staff treating him had never seen it before.
Tim Bray (right) and Todd Rippon in a 1984 student production of Peter Shaffer's play, Equus, with Auckland University's Theatre Workshop.
Desmoplastic small round cell sarcoma is a soft-tissue cancer more commonly seen in children and young adults. A British teenager who was photographed in October hugging the Princess of Wales died from the same sarcoma two and a half weeks ago, at the age of 17.
A much-loved and legendary figure in the Auckland performing arts community, Bray announced his North Shore theatre company would fold after failing to find a way for it to stay open without him.
Operated as a registered charitable trust and run by a team of 11 fulltime and part-time staff, the Tim Bray Theatre Company has staged more than 100 original productions and is surpassed only by Auckland Theatre Company in terms of audience size.
There’s no explanation for why the 60-year-old has developed this “one in a billion” cancer, which is incurable but may be controlled with ongoing treatment.
“I’m actually quite a private person, but to make sense of why we’re closing such a viable, healthy, robust, beautiful, theatre company, it had to be tempered with the reality of my personal journey,” he says.
“Because [the cancer] is so rare, there’s not much research on the probabilities or how it’s going to play out.
“For me, that’s a blessing because it’s just like, okay, this is my new waka. I’m on this one now, paddling hard, and we’ll just keep going as far as we can. You have to just focus in on today.”
Tim Bray with his partner, Bryce Hatton, at their civil union ceremony, held at St Columba Anglican Church in Grey Lynn in 2007.
Placed straight into an intensive chemotherapy regime, Bray has a total of 14 cycles scheduled through to July.
The effects of the drugs are so brutal his partner, Bryce Hatton – a massage therapist at the Harbour Cancer and Wellness treatment centre – has given up work to support him.
“I’ve said to Bryce at times that if ordinarily I’d be near 100%, today I feel 20% of that person. There’s this 80% cloud of fog on top. But within myself, I still completely feel me.”
The couple met in 2000 during the gay pride Hero Festival when Hatton was a volunteer usher at Bray’s solo show Me and My Vice (it was Bray who instigated the Big Gay Out so the community could also gather for “something ordinary, like a picnic”). They held a civil union ceremony in 2007 and their “rainbow family” includes two children in their early 20s.
“It’s a new world we find ourselves in, but yeah, he’s an incredible partner, holding me together.”
It seems fitting, somehow, that his company’s final production at Takapuna’s PumpHouse Theatre will be the 20th anniversary of The Santa Claus Show, a simple tale about the true meaning of Christmas. An annual tradition, it’s retained the same script and music since Bray first created it.
As both a director and performer, his core philosophy has always been that children’s theatre requires the same professionalism expected from adult productions (actors and technicians are paid at adult theatre rates) and young audiences deserve to be treated with creative respect.
This Auckland Youth Theatre production of Larry the Lamb in Toytown from the early 80s featured a cast of future luminaries, including Tim Bray (third from right) as the Inventor, future Toi Whakaari NZ Drama School director Christian Penny as The Mayor, comedian Mark Wright as the Policeman, and actor/comedian Alison Wall (Minya on Xena: Warrior Princess) as Dennis the Daschund.
Bray’s exposure to the arts began at an early age through his parents, who took him to theatre shows and encouraged him to sign up for drama classes.
His father remembered him falling off his chair with laughter as a 7-year-old during a performance of the black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace when he guessed the final twist.
To make that kind of childhood experience as widely accessible as possible, he launched a Gift-a-Seat programme for low-decile schools. When he discovered some families couldn’t afford the bus fare from South Auckland, he took his work to them.
The winding up of his company leaves a void that will be difficult to fill, after the closure of Capital E’s touring National Theatre for Children late last year and the youth-based Young and Hungry Arts Trust in 2022.
Bray, who was awarded the Queen’s Service Medal in 2017, despairs at how the sector has been devalued by funding cuts and an ideological shift that views the arts with ambivalence.
Creative thinking is a skill that’s needed more than ever, he says. And while an explosion in technology has transformed the world around them, children themselves haven’t changed.
“Humans need rich traditions and we’ve been sharing stories for millennia. The theatre of the day is just an extension of that, and children are just as needing of it and deserving of it as ever.”
The Santa Claus Show ‘24, created for ages 3-8, is on at The PumpHouse Theatre in Takapuna until December 22. The season includes NZSL-interpreted and audio-described performances, as well as a “sensory-relaxed” option for neurodivergent audience members.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special interest in social issues and the arts.
