Playwright Roger Hall - the quiet guy on the fringes

Playwright Roger Hall, whose latest play opens in Auckland this week, has chronicled the foibles of the middle class for 25 years. GILBERT WONG finds out what tickles his funny bone.

Roger Hall produces a photograph. It's a holiday snap taken when he and his wife Dianne were in the Czech Republic. Rather than smiling holidaymakers, it shows the young man taking their picture. He has contorted himself, rotated the camera, hunched his back and has his backpack tucked between his knees.

It's comical, likely to produce a chuckle rather than a guffaw and, in that, it says a lot about Hall.

He is politeness personified, solicitously offering coffee or tea, inquiring whether we are warm enough in the front sitting room of his Ponsonby villa.

Hall is not the man at the bar entertaining all and sundry with ribald jokes. He's the quiet guy on the fringes, making the odd wry remark. In a party you might find him in the kitchen.

Put this to him and Hall sounds slightly defensive: "I'm a very good joke-teller, as it happens. I can be funny. If I'm on song, I can be good at dinner parties. I don't want to dominate conversations."

He writes on a computer at a table in the other front room which looks directly to the footpath outside. A two-minute stroll and he can be amid the street theatre of Ponsonby Rd. Hall delights in it.

Comedy is hard work. Anyone who writes will tell you that the hardest thing to do on the printed page is to make someone laugh. Hall has always been able to go beyond the smart one-liners. For better or worse, he is our pre-eminent observer of the middle class.

For better because his plays since Gliding On in 1976 have never suffered the limbo of non-performance of so many other New Zealand playwrights. His plays fill houses. So of course, his autobiography was called Bums on Seats.

Hall has the peculiar quality of penning a play that hits the stage at the right moment. In theatre, timing is everything and Hall demonstrates a knack for it.

He has picked on the angst and aggravations of the middle class and put them on stage, from Gliding On, that gentle dig at the public service, to The Share Club, in 1987 (the year the markets crashed on Black Friday and Mortifying Monday), to Social Climbers in 1995 (five teachers go mad in a tramping hut), to C'Mon Black (one man's All Black supporter's tour) in 1996 and The Book Club in 1999.

His timing is scary, almost as if he's channelling the middle class zeitgeist.

"I do seem to have a sense of what's happening in the middle class. Social change is what interests me most. It fascinates me and I like documenting it. In a way, I'm always laughing at myself," he says.

When Hall's play Middle Age Spread reached the West End in 1979, with the main roles played by Richard Briers and Paul Eddington, veteran critic Michael Billington wrote in the Guardian: "Mr Hall writes like a fretful liberal concerned that, in a bourgeois democracy, everything stays more or less the same. Kids from good homes rise to the top while those from poor homes sink to the bottom. He offers no solutions but at least his comedy touches on some interesting problems."

Middle class. That has been Hall's fortune and his critical bete noir. For, while audiences have mostly gone in droves to Hall's plays, critics have looked for something more, whether that is more engagement with the problems and issues he raises or a resonance beyond the one-liners and astute observation.

Middle class as a label is the same as middle of the road. It reeks of the safe and unexciting and the good intentions that only the affluent might afford. It is the domain largely, as Billington put it, of the fretful liberal.

Hall accepts that the term can come with a stigma. "I was being interviewed and admitted I was middle class. I might as well have said I was a pederast. The journalist leaned forward, eyes bulging - he had his headline. It was astonishing."

Hall can only see the contradiction. "We were so snobbishly obsessed that we shouldn't have a class system, and yet it's getting more ingrained." He recalls his character Reg in Middle Age Spread complaining that middle class had become a term of abuse. Reg laments that all he wants to do is work hard and bring up his kids right.

Hall's response is: well, so what's wrong with being middle class? Which, despite the evidence of mounting class division, he still sees as the majority of the country.

His 25th play - he writes about one a year and has done so consistently since 1976 - is another comedy of social manners. Take a Chance on Me, which has its share of laughs, is interlaced with the silent tragedy of the middle aged who, through death, divorce or separation, have to hit the singles meat-market again, but this time out of condition and empty of youthful charm.

"I'm not mocking the situation. It's a comedy, it's funny, but it isn't making fun of those doing it. The play is sad as well as funny. Quite deliberately there's a thread of sadness. They've lost their partners and have to go through the painful process of picking themselves up."

It sounds like classic Hall material. But this year another play, A Way of Life, will premiere, to be toured by the New Zealand Actors' Company in September.

It's a historical epic that follows the fortunes of a farming family from the winning of a ballot for land after the First World War until close to the present day.

There's some family history in it. Dianne's parents ran a town-supply dairy farm, distinctly unglamorous, says Hall, while a generation back there were stories of being raised in a tent on newly broken-in land.

"I suppose it's a part of our history that a young generation is not aware of. We're urban now, people don't realise how farmers used to run the country nor the debt we owe to the economy for farming. It's not a preachy play, but it is history that is being forgotten."

And it isn't a comedy, for the first time since 1981. "Every now and then you feel goaded to write a serious play. I'm good at comedy but Market Forces had serious themes."

Hall says that in A Way of Life he did not set out to write a drama. "I think I just wanted to do it."

Was it to prove something?

"Maybe. Woody Allen says that writing comedy means you never get to sit at the top table. There's a faint stigma that comedy is not real drama.

"I'm not whining. Every writer of comedy does feel a little bit of this. And it doesn't keep me awake at night." He grins self-deprecatingly: "Maybe it'll turn out like Michael Jackson taking up baseball."

He means Michael Jordan, and we both laugh at his middle-aged slip. The interview ends. "I am what I am. There's no sense analysing what you do otherwise you can't do it. Too much analysis is not a good thing."

Take a Chance on Me, directed by Janice Finn, produced by the Auckland Theatre Company, opens this Friday and runs until August 18 at the Maidment Theatre. Hall will donate one night's royalties from each season of the play to the Arts Foundation of New Zealand.