Once upon a time, Deborah Hunt, Sally Rodwell and Alan Brunton reinvented romance. On stage and in life.
It was 1977 and Deborah Hunt needed to earn some money. So she went to see Carmen, then the most famous drag queen in the country. Carmen ran a Wellington “coffee bar” called Carmen’s Balcony, which staged drag shows and sold spirits over the bar illegally when the cops weren’t looking.
Hunt offered her a fire-eating show. “And,” she said, “I’ll do it topless.”
Hunt had previously performed a tango at Carmen’s with her friend Sally Rodwell. Hunt wore formal pants and a pair of braces, Rodwell a long dress open to the navel that she drifted around inside.
Along with Rodwell’s partner Alan Brunton, they were the core of Red Mole, an itinerant theatre group that had grown out of student workshops and community events in Auckland a few years previously.
Now, they were stepping up. Red Mole called their Sunday night shows at Carmen’s the Cabaret Capital Strut and the tone, as described by writer and Red Mole member Martin Edmond, was “irrepressible vulgarity”.
They threw in everything — dancing and political satire, jazz, rock and show tunes, mime, masks and puppetry, poetry and short plays, all of it stuffed full of rudeness and ribaldry.
“The first time I saw them,” one of the queens who worked there said later, “I thought, what whackos. They’re whackos and they’ll never make a dime.”
The first night, the place was packed. Before long, they were playing Fridays and Saturdays as well, and then they took over the whole week. Over six months that year, Red Mole performed nearly 100 shows, culminating in a marathon blitz of 37 nights in a row. There was always a queue to get in and they always had to turn people away.
“I believe in the field of dreams,” Hunt told me when I talked with her by Zoom. “You make something and people turn up. I see it happening all the time.”
No two shows were the same. Brunton, a poet, wrote new material all the time, Hunt made costumes, she and Rodwell worked up new choreography. Pianist extraordinaire Jan Preston was in charge of the music and she and the other musicians and performers kept inventing and reinventing too. You could audition to join, and many people did.
“Whatever happened that week turned up onstage,” says Edmond in Annie Goldson’s film Red Mole: A Romance, which opens in cinemas on Valentine’s Day.
They enacted the recent murder of a gay man in Christchurch, by a group of youths, with the Beatles’ Love Me Do and Willie Nelson’s Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain as the soundtrack. They performed a short story by Frank Sargeson. Hunt breathed fire and they danced a great many topless tangos.
Poet Arthur Baysting was roped in to be the show’s MC. He adopted the persona of Neville Purvis, “Neville on the level”, a small-time crook from the Hutt Valley in a greasy white suit. Baysting says he was terrified and wore shades to hide it. The audience found him hilarious.
The cabaret was full of politics. Robert Muldoon was the Prime Minister, there were protests in the streets and Red Mole’s message, says Edmond, was: “Don’t take these people seriously because they’re clowns and fools. But they’re quite sinister clowns and fools.”
Hunt played a recurring character called The Pig, a jeering, arrogant, malicious bully with pink papier-mâché nose and ears and a pillow strapped to her belly under her shirt. It was Muldoon.
Brunton, Rodwell and Hunt — it was the great romantic power of three. Endlessly stimulating, dynamic, unstable. They made friends for what seemed like it would be forever, but there’s no glory without pain.
The writer Chris Kraus says, “Sally and Deb were like two sides of the same mind, and then there was Alan, so there was this brilliant triangulated three-part brain.”
Nance Shatzkin, who became their American manager, puts it a little differently. “Sal and Deb were thick as thieves,” she says. “Just thick as thieves. And Alan had relationships with both of them, and they with each other.”
It was, she says, “really tempestuous and also solid”. They argued all the time.
Shatzkin: “They relished arguing with each other. They relished having a big fight. I remember Sally and Alan said, ‘You know it’s okay, you can fight and fight all day long, you go to bed and you have a good f***, and you wake up in the morning and you’re happy.’”
The arguments were not only with each other. That same year, Red Mole found time to tour as the opening act for Split Enz. It was an apex moment in the country’s creative history and the Moles awed audiences with their giant puppetry and raucous pageantry. But the two groups didn’t get on.
“They didn’t like us,” Hunt told me. “Backstage, they flicked their towels at us. Juvenile stuff.”
No dressing room, the story goes, was ever big enough to contain both Alan Brunton and Tim Finn.
Red Mole closed their own show down at Carmen’s. Time to go. It was such a New Zealand thing, anarchic and clever and lovable, but when you’re world famous in Wellington, what you really want to know is, can you make it in the world?
They moved to Auckland, toured a bit more, and then they were off to New York.
It was tough. Touring, they could make enough money to buy food and pay the bills, but for the rest of the time they had to busk or find something else. Edmond wrote pornography. Hunt and Rodwell worked the “dry hustle bars” around Times Square.
“If you went to the right place and you took off enough clothes, people gave you 20 dollar bills,” says Shatzkin. “How could you turn your back?
“Sometimes they imported scenes of the sex work into the show,” says Kraus. “Their work was continuous. That’s part of the genius of Red Mole that I didn’t understand at the time.”
Eventually, in 1988, Shatzkin got them a big festival booking. Edmond says if they’d taken it, “that would have been their career path”.
Hunt remembers it differently. “It was a Pepsi festival,” she says. “Sally and I said, ‘Screw Pepsi.’ We weren’t doing that.”
It was the turning point. Actor John Davies, who had joined Red Mole straight from drama school in the mid-seventies and been an almost-but-not-quite member of the core group ever since, has a telling moment in the film. He says he realised he was lonely. He left.
Hunt and her partner left too, and moved to central America – Mexico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, places where dictatorial governments reigned supreme. They worked with political theatre groups.
“It was really dangerous, what they were doing,” says Goldson. Then on to Puerto Rico, her partner’s home country.
“I’ve trained two generations of puppeteers, I’ve worked a lot, here and around the world,” Hunt said on our call. She was sitting in her workshop, the shelves behind her full of paints, masks and all sorts of tat. “I feel privileged,” she said. She’s been there 33 years.
Rodwell and Brunton, meanwhile, returned to New Zealand, toured some more, settled into Island Bay in Wellington, raised their daughter Ruby and got involved with community fundraising and arts groups in the city.
Rodwell especially — she worked alongside Madeleine McNamara in the Magdalena Project, training a new generation and producing some spectacular feminist pageants.
There’s a natural arc to it. Life that flares with bright intensity and then burns steadily, warming others.
“They were very happy,” says Edmond. “And they got happier and happier. It was lovely.”
But romance isn’t a natural arc. In 2002, during a stopover in Amsterdam, aged just 55, Alan Brunton fell down dead. His heart gave out.
And that broke Sally Rodwell’s heart too. For the next four years, she could not find a way to mend it.
“I would have thought Mum and I would battle this together,” says Ruby. “But she didn’t. It was the hardest f**king four years of my life.”
On his birthday, they sat among the seaweed on the beach and Sally said to Ruby, “Your dad would have been so proud of you.” That night, she took her own life.
“I think,” says Ruby, “that people just didn’t really get the fact that she was dying.”
“We never got over each other,” said Deb Hunt. “All of us.” She calls herself an “immortalist”. She said, “I want to keep doing this forever.”
I asked her what she tells the people she trains and works with.
“Be dangerous. When you’re on stage, create whole worlds. And document your work.” (Quite a bit of Red Mole’s work was recorded and it’s in the film, but much more of it has been lost.)
“And don’t wait for grants. Don’t let a lack of funding stop you.”
Romance? Brunton once described putting on a show as “clawing up hills towards mountains, towards the complete moonrise, and it might be a blood-red moon and it might be coming up in the middle of a glacier of stars. And out there . . . is the origin. You come back to your origin, you remember where you came from. And in those memories is the perfection that you were always looking for.”
Ruby says, “What I remember about my parents was the looks on their faces when the other one was doing something. It was pure respect, adoration and love.” She’s in her thirties now, living in Mexico.
She also says, about her mother, “There was just a high dramatic romantic element to this whole story. That’s exciting but it has a very dark side. And if you don’t allow your psychology to come back to reality every so often, you get lost in this fantasy. I think that’s what happened to her.”
The film ends with Rodwell walking along the coast road in Island Bay, the dunes and sea just over the wall beyond. She wears black – hat, jacket, skinny pants, boots, gloves – and carries a black suitcase. Her face is white and she walks head down, there’s a wind, pushing herself along, towards and then past us.
The footage comes from a film shot by Sally Rodwell and the filmmaker Barry Thomas. What was Rodwell thinking when she made that? She’s Death, she’s in a Bergman movie, and now it’s the movie of her own death.
Romance is doomed, is that it? What makes life worth living is that it won’t last.
But while you’re strutting on stage, half-naked, dancing, breathing fire, singing your heart out, or as I remember it, while you’re sitting spellbound in the audience – for as long as the show is on, maybe you are immortal.
Because what’s immortality, in theatre, sex, life, whatever it is, a windy day in Wellington, but to live in the moment?
Red Mole: A Romance is in selected theatres from February 14.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, urban planning and design, and the arts. He joined the Herald in 2018.
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