Literary legend's life and death

By Jane Phare

For Auckland actor Tessa Mitchell, the colourful life of her grandfather, Bob Lowry, who died a lonely, tragic death three years before she was born, was a story waiting to be performed.

The telling had already happened in the form of family stories about the mythical Lowry, printer to New Zealand's up-and-coming literary set in the 40s and 50s.

Armed with impressions of a man who, decades after his death, was still larger than life, Mitchell and musician Ben Holmes tracked down colleagues and friends who remembered Lowry.

Mitchell and Holmes filmed 30 hours of interviews (now housed at the Turnbull Library) to form a picture of the charismatic Lowry, sorting out fact from fiction, breaking down the myth and rebuilding it.

The result is I Am a Dark River: the Many Stories of Bob Lowry, a performance piece which opens for a 10-day season tomorrow at the Silo Theatre in Auckland.

On stage Mitchell plays her grandfather, telling the life story of an artist, printer, father, husband, party host and angry alcoholic; a complex character who could switch from bellowing, uproarious humour to drunk, desperate anger.

Lowry is portrayed as inventive and at times outrageous, a modern printer who added a Pythonesque sense of fun to his work.

He provided an arena for the work and views of artists, writers and political commentators who might not otherwise have had a voice in those conservative times, printing magazines such as Phoenix, Manuka, Kiwi and his own publication, Here and Now.

Lowry published Denis Glover, A.R.D. Fairburn, James K Baxter, Frank Sargeson, Allen Curnow and Hone Tuwhare, often adding his own brand of wit and creativity.

Many became friends of Lowry's and, acknowledging the role he played in their lives, several of them immortalised him in their writings.

James K. Baxter wrote of Lowry at the end of one of his poems: Here Lowry lived, a stone volcanic god Fed with honey and red gourds Opening his heart like a great door To poets, lovers and the houseless poor.

In those years Lowry was a legendary and generous host. The parties at the Lowry home on the slopes of One Tree Hill were renowned for their variety of colourful, talented guests.

They were a place to rub shoulders with artists, writers and poets; Bohemians who were valiantly trying to withstand the pull of conservative suburbia.

But Lowry's golden years were numbered. A volatile temper and alcoholism gradually drove his allies and his family away. Finally, in 1963, his wife, Irene, took her three daughters and left. Three months later Lowry, sick and alone, committed suicide in his home at the age of 51.

I Am a Dark River took two years of research and interviews, collecting stories about Lowry from his daughters Vanya, Brigid and Judy (Mitchell's mother), from Mitchell's father, architect David Mitchell, and from old friends like Bob and Dame Catherine Tizard, Martyn and Peggy Finlay, Kevin Ireland, Ron Holloway, Hamish Keith and C.K. Stead.

Juxtaposed with Mitchell's performance - which, she admits, is exhausting vocally and physically - are segments of those filmed interviews, photographs of Lowry and examples of his printing.

Holmes accompanies the performance on stage with percussion music from a drum kit made up of hub caps, bicycle wheels, bells, and the like, interspersed with recordings of saxophone, violin and thumb piano (an African instrument plucked with the thumbs).