Dame Kate Harcourt's joyous stage of life

Dame Kate Harcourt is not one to stand on ceremony,
but rather delights in the opportunity to continually
improve, writes GILBERT WONG.

They arrive by the busload from dots on the map such as Ngaruawahia and Ngutunui. They're country kids, barefoot, in school shorts and T-shirts. High spirits snap off them like bubble gum, because this is the big smoke. They've come to see theatre.

The lights dim in the Founders Theatre, Hamilton. A spot lights a figure on stage. It's a woman of indeterminate age. An orange scarf fails to contain hair that tumbles in luxuriant auburn ringlets.

"Welcome," she says, and her audience roars and yells and whistles and kicks at the seats in front. She pauses and begins to tell the tale of how a stubborn donkey, a vain cat, a cheeky rooster and a timid dog become the musicians of Bremen.

The gypsy is Kate Harcourt, more formally Dame Kate Harcourt, though she treats the honorific like a disreputable relative - its existence has to be acknowledged, but you don't want it staying with you.

Along with Katrina Talbot (Cat), Mark Sant (Dog), Stephen Butterworth (Rooster) and Mick Rose (Donkey), she is working on a month-long tour of the Capital E National Theatre for Children's production of The Musicians of Bremen. Directed by Peter Wilson, the show is a sharp, spirited retelling of the tale of how four animals, abused and unwanted by their owners, find freedom and fulfilling lives.

The actors sing unaccompanied; interact with their audience; perform clever puppetry and play multiple roles. Harcourt, who turns 74 in June, is as full of energy as her younger colleagues.

Off stage and out of costume, she is her age. In casual clothes, her hair is a crown of white, she wears reading glasses and, because of a twisted knee from a holiday injury ("playing silly buggers, that's what I was doing"), walks with a crutch.

Harcourt says straight away to call her Kate. She is nothing like a dame. "I use it when it's official, but don't like it in the theatre. It's a bit invidious when you're part of a company - it isn't appropriate. I'm proud of it, part of me is, but another part thinks 'Oh gawd, what do I want with it?"'

Her voice, that most prized tool of any actor, is warm, her diction ringing, firm and melodious. If you are the right age you might recall this voice on the 60s radio programme Listen with Mother. You will certainly have heard it on radio or as a disembodied voice in numerous commercials.

She recalls Listen with Mother in the biographical memoir Flowers From My Mother's Garden, written by daughter Miranda and her husband Stuart McKenzie: "It was what I call our 'dark age.' We hardly went out or did anything but work. I wouldn't get to bed until three in the morning sometimes. It was a very hard time. That was after I had my back operated on and I wasn't able to lift Miranda or do anything for her for about six months. We started at nine in the morning and would record for three hours, three mornings a week."

Harcourt has come full circle. She first trained as a kindergarten teacher, and half a century later here she is again before an audience of children. "Children are a great audience. You can't fool them," she says.

Theatre for children can patronise and seem aimed more to appease middle-class parental sensibilities than to bring an artform to children. But Harcourt has no doubts that children should be exposed to quality theatre.

"They need to be weaned away from moving wallpaper and the idea that they are passive people being entertained by a machine. They can see real people, flesh and blood and it should give them the idea that they can do it too. They don't have to be professional actors, but through theatre they can learn how to write and tell their own stories."

"When I was growing up, people looked for their sense of culture and their sense of identity from across the water," - from Flowers From My Mother's Garden.

Her childhood was spent in Canterbury, on a homestead in Okuku Pass. After training as a kindergarten teacher she went to the University of Melbourne to study singing, a vocation she continued in London at the Joan Cross Opera School.

Upon returning to New Zealand she settled in Wellington, where she met her late husband Peter Harcourt while working at the Monde Marie coffee bar. He was planning a musical and cast his future wife. Married in 1959, they had two children, Miranda, an actor and Gordon, a journalist and broadcaster.

Her mother, a Parkinson's sufferer, died slowly at 75.

" ... she hung on in a lot of misery. That's why I carry a little green card in my bag saying, 'Don't resuscitate me." - from Flowers From My Mother's Garden.

The Harcourts have had to live with the shorthand label "family of theatre."

"It's an awful tag," she says, frowning. But like all tags, it has some truth. Miranda is one of the country's most accomplished actors and directors. Gordon has dabbled in acting, while Peter was a mainstay of Wellington theatre.

Bearing in mind her dislike of the tag, what would she hope, then, for her grandchildren, Miranda and Stuart's children Peter, 2 1/2, and Thomasin, six months?

Her brow furrows, "We would possibly encourage them not to go into theatre.

"But in the end it's the same as farmers being farmers. You can't force kids into anything. They find what they want.

"Though with Miranda and Gordon, they were surrounded by theatre. It demystified things for them. They went into it fully aware that it wasn't glamorous and it was insecure. They still went ahead."

Harcourt has had too many roles to count, on stage, radio and television. She's been on the board of the New Zealand Drama School.

Five years ago she was made a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her contribution to the theatre. Miranda and Gordon had to talk her into accepting the honour. It was a year after her husband Peter died of cancer.

"And I was coming back on the ferry, pulling into Wellington early, early in the morning. I could see this man in a splendid blue overcoat, standing on the wharf as the white mist turned around him. And I thought, 'Who is that man?' And then my heart jumped and I thought, 'O my God, it's Peter Harcourt.' I had a bunch of violets that my mother had given me and as I walked down the aisle, the gangway, I gave them to him. He was a bit taken aback and he said, 'How did you know I was going to be waiting for you?' Of course, I didn't, but sometimes you've got to improvise. And that's the sort of marriage we had, writing the script as we went along, swapping roles every now and then." - from Flowers From My Mother's Garden.

Her favourite role comes as a bit of a surprise. She nominates Maud, the old bag she developed for the women's comedy revue Hen's Teeth. Maud was her dark alter ego who could say and do things Harcourt could only dream of.

In terms of theatre proper, she is most proud of her co-production with Miranda, Flowers From My Mother's Garden.

The play is part biography, part exploration of her relationship with Miranda. The tone runs from painful confessional to waspy, humorous banter between mother and daughter. Harcourt estimates that 40,000 people have now seen the play, which was last performed at the Taranaki Arts Festival last month.

We have skirted the inevitable and discourteous question of when she will have to leave the stage. "What's next?" is the question that frets every actor.

"I really don't know. Teaching at the Wellington Performing Arts School. A few speeches ... on my life in theatre," her eyes roll skyward.

It has always been thus for her.

"There's still joy whenever I go on stage. Every show is different, maybe only one step, you might deliver a line differently. But it's always alive, and that's what makes theatre more interesting than television, because you have a chance every night to do something just a little bit better."

*The Musicians of Bremen, directed by Peter Wilson, at the Bruce Mason Centre, Takapuna, from March 26 to 29.