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Long before Peter Jackson filmed part of The Hobbit trilogy near the small King Country town of Piopio, John G Davies would head out on a horse, accompanied by his little dog, to roam the craggy landscape and conjure up epic stories.
“I would create these fantasies of armies and heroes and heroines and people in danger, and I was the saviour. There were great herds of cattle that became ‘beasts’ to be attacked,” Davies, now in his 60s, recalls of his boyhood.
“I kind of lived in my own imagination in a funny kind of way, and it never really left me, that idea of being out in the wide-open space, imagining everything around me was dynamic and explosive and that things were happening…”
Davies became an intercultural performer, theatre and opera director and actor who toured for 10 years with the legendary Red Mole Enterprises. He retired from Unitec in 2019 and is back on the road with his one-person show, Te Tupua – The Goblin. Here, he explains more about Te Tupua – The Goblin and the extraordinary career that has taken him around the world.
The father of three lives in West Auckland; his wife, Ali, is his tour manager.
John, why did you make Te Tupua – The Goblin?
Around 2000, I was doing an MA. I was reading a lot about the colonisation of the Pacific by Europeans, and the way Enlightenment philosophies manifested themselves in the process of colonisation.
I kept coming across a number of Robinson Crusoe-type stories where Europeans found themselves as castaways having to live with tangata whenua populations. I was very interested in this, so I suggested to my supervisors that when I did my final presentation that I read it as a play script.
In the process of preparing that, I learned a lot about a number of men and women who lived here as Māori, in Aotearoa, in the early years of the 19th century. I found their stories fascinating and here I have to acknowledge our academics – people like Trevor Bentley, Joan Druett and Dame Anne Salmond – who have put into the historical record accounts of the way people lived in those early years.
After I finished the MA, I thought, ‘I’ve got a really good story here, perhaps I could put it on stage,’ so I edited the script, cut a few characters out, and turned into a piece I could perform as a solo show. In 2002/03, I performed it about a dozen times around Waikato and Rotorua, but then life changed. I took on a full-time teaching position at the University of Waikato Theatre Studies Department.
What’s Te Tupua – The Goblin it all about?
It tells the story of a Scottish lad of 10 who’s driven into slavery aboard His Majety’s ships, circa 1800. After 15 years at sea, he winds up in Aotearoa and the fight for survival begins. The play is drawn for the histories I read, and the character is an amalgam of the experiences some of those who lived in Aotearoa at the time experienced.
It’s performed with just three props and a mask, and it draws on elements of Ancient Greek and the Japanese Noh Theatre. I’ve edited and revised parts of it quite heavily since it was first performed.
Why were you doing an MA?
I was involved in setting up the Acting for Stage and Screen Degree at Unitec in Auckland and suddenly the management of the institution came to us and said, “there’s half a dozen of you here running this programme and none of you have got any academic degrees but and you’re going to be conferring bachelor’s degrees on students, so you’d better get yourselves sorted out!”
I applied to have a bachelor’s degree through recognition of prior learning, which was accepted, and then I did a two-year MA.
Had you studied before?
I went to Teachers College in Hamilton in 1972. I had a year there, but I really struggled with it; I couldn’t settle. I liked the idea of teaching but at that time in my life, I was restless and the whole idea of study didn’t suit me so I ran away.
Where to?
The Court Theatre in Christchurch. I met Yvette Bromley and Mervyn Thompson, who founded the company, and they cast me in a couple of plays. My first professional job was in 1974 during the Christchurch Commonwealth Games.
There were four of us, and we performed Pongo plays, English versions of the Italian Commedia dell’arte. We would drag a cart from the Court Theatre into Cathedral Square and fold down the sides, so it became a little set. The main character is Sam Pongo, a mischievous chap who gets up to all sorts of tricks.
And you were bitten by the theatre bug?
It was the moment I knew I had found my tribe. I became fascinated with the whole mysterious idea of performance and what it is. The transformation of self is a really appealing and fascinating challenge. To embody the actions and thoughts of another person, it’s an intriguing idea.
Then I began to discover the literature of theatre. I distinctly remember going to the library in Christchurch, sitting and reading the plays of Sophocles and Euripides. I was almost overwhelmed by how straightforward they were.
I’d been exposed to Shakespeare, and I found the metaphorical language and the subplots interesting, but I never deeply connected with it. When I read the Ancient Greek plays, I was just right there because they’re so direct, so simple. The language is powerful; the characters, and their reasons for what they’re doing, are so clear.
What did your family in the King Country make of all this?
When I left teachers’ training college, my father was horrified! They worried a lot and were quite freaked out. I said to my mother at one point, because she had four children, “didn’t you perhaps expect that one of your children would be interested in art, and so forth?” and she said, “we didn’t know people like you existed until we met you”.
My father came and saw me in King Lear playing the role of Edmund, because he was an admirer of Shakespeare, and that was good moment for him. They got over it and accepted it, but the funny thing was that my dad was an amateur players’ group in Piopio called the Twine Players.
![Davies (centre front) joined the theatre troupe Red Mole in the 1970s. Photo / Joe Bleakley](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/MKCS3UNRVREORHMJ7ZG3EJNOAQ.jpg?auth=275cc0d8c7fdcf8f32bbe942339eb283c9fc7e683db30e5d4bf7f2e13ee6089d&width=16&height=10&quality=70&smart=true)
You joined Red Mole in the 1970s, how did that happen?
After Christchurch, I went to drama school in Wellington which was in the old Salvation Army Hostel in Taranaki St. The wonderful George Webby, who ran the place, hired out some rooms in the building. A group of people turned up to make masks for a performance to do with the 1975 election – the contest between Robert Muldoon and Bill Rowling – and I was fascinated by what they were doing.
I ended up sitting in these rooms making masks, sculpting from clay, and got to know them. When they asked if I wanted to go on a summer tour of North Island motor camps, I said yes. I did go back to drama school, but they asked me to go on another tour, so I dropped out and never graduated.
I stayed until 1984, when we were in New York, and I reached a point where I thought, “I feel like this has come to its end”, so I told my dear friends I was going home to Aotearoa. One night I was walking past the Lincoln Center and there was a performance of traditional Japanese Noh theatre, so I went in.
And you ended up in Japan?!
Yes, the next day I went to the New York Public Library and read some of the plays. They had the same effect on me that the Greek ones had had all those years ago, but there was fundamental difference in that Greek plays revolve around conflict, which the whole idea of Western theatre in built on. In Japanese Noh, the purpose of the plays is to redeem a suffering spirt, to release a character from the torment that they’ve living in.
I linked up with a group from New York University and went to Kyoto to study. It was a revelation to me because the whole tradition that I’d come from, the Western tradition and Red Mole, was kind of In Yer Face avant-garde. Noh is contemplative, beautiful with only the essence of movement. It drew me toward it rather than crashing toward me.
And these elements are in Te Tupua – The Goblin?
They are.
How do you negotiate the conflict that can occur between being Pākehā and playing Māori roles or telling Māori stories?
I am a not fluent te reo speaker but have been studying te reo, and te ao Māori, for a number of years. I talk to my colleagues; I talk to my friends, and I study my own motives. I want to be as sincere and capable as I can possibly be. I remain open all the time, but extraordinary people have encouraged and supported me in the past.
What do you hope the audience gets out of coming to see Te Tupua – The Goblin?
The play is from a corner of our history that is available for people but it’s not often explored, so it calls into question the nature of the relationship between Pākehā and Māori. Lee Tamahori explored it beautifully with his film The Convert. It’s a wonderful film; he’s a master.
Te Tupua – The Goblin is touring thanks to Arts on Tour and is performed at Waiheke Island’s Artworks Theatre on Thursday June 6 and Saturday June 8. There are plans to tour the Coromandel in August.