Waipukurau Little Theatre is presenting a double bill with all the trimmings to celebrate 130 years of drama in Central Hawke’s Bay.
The double bill is a replication of the first show put on in Waipukurau by the newly established Waipukurau Dramatic Club in September 1893.
Directed by Jules Hamilton, each night’s entertainment presents two one-act farces: Done on Both Sides, written in 1854 by popular Victorian playwright John Maddison Morton, and Box and Cox, Married and Settled, written in 1852 by J Stirling Coyne, a sequel to his earlier, best-known farce Box and Cox.
Morton was a specialist in one-act farces but in his last decades the popularity of Victorian burlesque greatly diminished. He fell on hard times and in 1881 became a Charterhouse pensioner. It was said of Morton that “the unlucky thing about him was that, though he could write as well at 80 as at 30, he was left stranded high and dry by the receding wave of fashion”.
