A gruelling journey around his father

By LINDA HERRICK

Tom Scott's play Daylight Atheist has its "world premiere" at the Maidment Theatre on Thursday but it's already debuted before his toughest critics: his family.

A one-man tour de force about Danny Moffatt, an embittered old man in self-imposed exile in his grubby bedroom, Daylight Atheist is based on the emotionally destructive life of Scott's own father, Tom.

"I gave the script to my brothers and sisters to read," explains Scott. "Brother Mickey said, 'Lived through it once, don't need to read the play'. Jane said, 'He was more of a bastard than you've described'. Sally said, 'You've left out all sorts of rotten things', and so did Sue.

"Then brother Robbie came to the read-through that Stuart Devenie did [Devenie is playing Danny in the Auckland Theatre Company production; Grant Tilly is playing him in Te Papa's Soundings Theatre in May].

"Rob was quite tearful throughout it. His face was puffy. He said it was hard going but it's got to go on. He was quite insistent."

When Scott first toyed with the idea of writing a play about Irish-born Tom snr, who died without reconciliation with his son in 1991, "It was absolutely about my father and the stage was populated with all sorts of other people".

"But it did not work. He was just a man on stage being belligerent and sometimes funny, and all these other passive people. I thought it would work better if I had one man who explains himself to God, or a stranger in a bar, or to himself. It's almost like a plea for mitigation. He's got to explain why he's exiled himself in that room. But at the same time he was wonderful with his friends. The best of my father was not seen by his family."

As soon as Scott dropped everyone else from the script, the play was completed within three weeks. "When I started to tell it from Danny's point of view, he started to become less and less like my father, which was a relief. There are lots of similarities, he has plagiarised my father's lines, but he's Danny Moffatt now. It's not a biography."

Because Scott knew virtually nothing about his father's life in Ireland except that he'd fought in the war, got Scott's mother pregnant on the eve of his departure for New Zealand and then descended into a fury of loathing for his family as five more children arrived, the writer made up a childhood scenario that might explain the subsequent neuroses.

Scott agrees many New Zealanders who grew up in a post-war era will relate with varying degrees of shuddering memory to the tale of silent fathers who came home from battle.

"My father was an extreme case but other dads came back from the war who were silent and sullen. I've been realising for some time they went through an awful lot and craved dull, boring, lawn-mowing lives and we thought they were so dull."

One member of the family who won't be seeing the play, or reading the script, is Scott's 80-year-old mother, who lives in a flat beneath his home.

"Mum now sees him through the pink mists of nostalgia, saying 'Oh, he was a good provider, there was always food on the table'. But we were sitting on apple boxes under naked light bulbs.

"I remember whenever it rained, every saucepan and Agee jar was put out to catch the rain. When windows were smashed they weren't fixed. He once chased me down the hall and punched his fist through a kauri door and that remained unfixed forever. It was all rather grim.

"I don't want Mum to see the play because she got punished once. She used to be such a gay, lively, spirited person when she was young in Ireland, and then she ended up in the most ramshackle houses in Feilding. Life for her was unhappy for a lot of the time."

Tough as parts of it may be, Scott hopes Daylight Atheist will make people laugh as well. "There will probably be buckets of tears but there should be lots of laughter as well. Tears and laughter are very close cousins - they both involve surrender."Linda Herrick

* Daylight Atheist: Maidment Theatre, April 18-May 11; Soundings Theatre, Te Papa, May 3-18.