SOURCE: McNaughton, Howard. “The Emergent Drama, 1840-1914.” In New Zealand Drama, pp. 15-27. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

[In the following essay, McNaughton presents a survey of New Zealand drama from the late 1800s to the mid-twentieth century.]

When the systematic colonization of New Zealand began in 1840, the English and Scottish settlers faced a rugged, largely unexplored country. The six early townships were widely separated through the two major islands, and each settlement quickly established cultural idiosyncrasies which were to be fostered by isolation and parochialism. The indigenous Maori population had no theater form of its own, and the European settlers—with a background of Protestant puritanism—were largely antagonistic to the arts. This meant that mid-nineteenth-century New Zealand drama was practiced by an atypical minority, viewed only by the more adventurous of the citizenry, and reported—if at all—by morally defensive newspaper columnists. However, when one considers that one quarter of these early settlers were totally illiterate, and that these seem to have constituted the bulk of the early theater audience, it is easy to accept that colonial New Zealand drama was initially a laboring-class phenomenon which often attracted wider public attention only through the court columns of the newspapers.

I COLONIAL PRODUCTION CONDITIONS

By 1843, regular theatrical performances were established in the North Island townships of Auckland and Wellington, and in the South Island settlement of Nelson. In each case, the theater was under the patronage of a popular hotel and catered for an appropriately unsophisticated audience, with farces, melodramas, or variety programs. The scale of these enterprises was not sufficient to generate much lasting publicity, and it may be assumed that numerous similar hotel theaters emerged in most New Zealand settlements within a decade.

Under such production conditions, the literary genesis of a script is of little concern to anyone but the researcher. Claims of novelty and originality were attached even to hackneyed pieces, and the New Zealand stage probably saw its share of the literary piracy that flourished within nineteenth-century melodrama. The first recorded performance of a locally written play in New Zealand was on July 11, 1848, when James Marriott wrote, produced, and acted a lead part in “Marcilina; Or the Maid of Urnindorpt;”¹ this two-act drama attracted a full house at Wellington's Britannia Saloon, but was neither published, reported, nor revived. Whether this was the first New Zealand play to reach the stage, and whether it was a wholly original work, may not be determined.

In the early colonial period Auckland developed most quickly. Its population was relatively cosmopolitan with a significant Irish element; being in the north, it had the closest link with Australia, and absorbed several pioneers of the Australian stage. However, two developments undermined the presidency of Auckland and increased the cultural importance of Dunedin, in the far south: the Maori Wars and the New Zealand Gold Rushes.

Intermittent warfare with the Maori population was largely the result of disputed land sales, and extended from 1854 until after the withdrawal of the last British troops in 1870. Most of the fighting was in the North Island, and visiting British regiments both dominated theater audiences and presented theatrical entertainments themselves: the identity of the North Island theater was to a considerable extent invested in the troops, and their gradual departure had a sobering effect on many aspect of local life.

Gold was discovered in Otago in 1861, and the population of Dunedin quintupled in two years; by 1863, a quiet Scottish township had developed into a cosmopolitan city of sixty thousand, including many itinerant veterans of the Australian and Californian goldfields. At about the same time, a gold rush led to the settlement of the West Coast of the South Island. The diggers had their own entertainment habits, which led to much of New Zealand's hotel entertainment being transplanted directly to the goldfields. But the influx of wealth also led to the construction of substantial civic theaters in the supporting cities of Dunedin and Christchurch, and to other cultural developments like the establishment of the University of Otago in 1869. Gradually, this educational and theatrical consolidation was to produce the first fully New Zealand playwrights, but many of the early writers who contributed to the emergent New Zealand drama were in no sense New Zealanders; like the goldfields audiences, they were itinerants who happened to work briefly in New Zealand.

George Darrell is usually regarded as an Australian playwright, and as such his work has been adequately discussed.² But Darrell was born in England (in about 1850), and served his theatrical apprenticeship in the New Zealand goldfields before establishing himself as an Australian playwright in 1877 and devoting most of his career to touring Australia and New Zealand. New Zealand theater columnists were often unaccountably hostile to Darrell's most successful plays, such as “Transported for Life” (1877), The Sunny South (1883), and “The Double Event” (1893).

Another playwright whose career spanned the Australasian theater circuit was George Leitch, whose early work consisted mainly of stage adaptations of novels, such as His Natural Life in 1886 and Wanda in 1887; in 1895 Leitch wrote The Land of the Moa, the most successful nineteenth-century melodrama on a New Zealand subject, and the only such work surviving in manuscript.

The most illuminating account of the attitudes and conditions of the itinerant professionals in the period after the gold rushes occurs in Joe Graham's An Old Stock-Actor's Memories. Graham was working in Christchurch in 1875, when the local theater was managed by William Hoskins, an eminent veteran of the English and the Australian theater. Graham's account of the Christchurch theater is anecdotal, and it is only while arguing his own involvement in the first balloon ascent on stage that he mentions “Crime in the Clouds,” written by Launce Booth, the company's juvenile.

In most respects, “Crime in the Clouds” seems to have been an undistinguished mid-Victorian melodrama with a narrative structure similar to that used by George Darrell. The first two acts were set in Buckinghamshire, and involved a secret marriage between an English aristocrat and his gamekeeper's daughter, with numerous other interests complicating the relationship. It was in Buckinghamshire that the balloon was located, but with the third act the drama shifted to New Zealand:

The author here made his debut in the character of the gallant Major Von Tempsky, killed in the Waikato War of 1866, and was greeted with a storm of cheers. A special feature was to have been the introduction of a real native war-dance—when well done one of the most terribly impressive sights imaginable—but the Middle Island Maoris are a mild, inoffensive race, vastly inferior to the fierce, tattooed tribesmen of Auckland or Taranaki, and the idea was abandoned. We managed, however, to unearth a few dusky super-numeraries from a native “whare” at Kaiapoi, who, in consideration of a certain small tribute to their head man, and a bottle of rum apiece, condescended to waft a faint air of realism, and a strong odour of fish oil, over the footlights.³

Graham's narrative argues emphatically against a popular notion that the Maori has until recently been reluctant to appear in drama because of ancestral doctrine that identity is too sacrosanct to be tampered with through impersonation or characterization. Maori actors have always been in short supply on the New Zealand stage, but not for the reasons commonly given, as Graham's account of the Maori scene makes clear:

The low comedian, having fallen into the hands of the wily enemy, was, according to the author, bound to the stake, tortured, and finally set fire to. This was a serious solecism, inexcusable in anyone who had actually lived in the country. The New Zealand savage does not, and never did, torture the captive … He would eat him cheerfully, and to that end would tenderly bake him with an abundance of yams, plantain leaves, and fern root, but his “long pork” was invariably despatched as quickly and mercifully as possible.⁴

The torture scene obviously appeared purely for formulaic reasons, as the conventional melodramatic consequence of the aliens temporarily getting the upper hand, whether they were American Indians, Congolese Negroes, or South Sea cannibals. Anthropological accuracy seems to have troubled neither actors nor audience, and the Maori supernumeraries allegedly participated in this stage travesty of their tribal ethos with scarcely controllable enthusiasm.

Graham and his fellow professionals clearly thought of themselves as craftsmen rather than as artists; they had no literary interests or pretensions, and their working conditions did not allow for detailed interpretation of particular scripts. But at the same period the New Zealand stage saw the emergence of numerous men of letters who were as interested in publication as in performance; indeed, none of the New Zealand plays published before 1900 seems to have reached performance.

II EARLY LITERARY PLAYWRIGHTS

The first of New Zealand's notable literary playwrights was the novelist B. L. Farjeon, of Dunedin. His three-act melodrama “A Life's Revenge” (1864) was set in France of the Revolution, and his burlesques “Faust” (1865) and “Guy Fawkes” (1867) achieved a modest local popularity. A stage version of Farjeon's goldfields novel Grif (1867) toured much of the country in 1881.⁵

The first daily newspaper in New Zealand was founded in Dunedin, largely by Julius Vogel, who was later to become one of the country's most celebrated politicians. Under Vogel's patronage literature and the arts flourished in Dunedin, and his own five-act stage version of Lady Audley's Secret, which premiered in 1863, was revived for the Duke of Edinburgh's visit in 1869.

Vogel's play was first presented anonymously, a common practice among gentlemen playwrights of the period, and one that has obscured the literary origins of several nineteenth-century New Zealand writers. The most spectacular such case is that of Fergus W. Hume, who became famous in England as the author of more than one hundred detective novels; the most successful of these, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), sold half a million copies. Hume was born in England in 1859 and taken to New Zealand in his infancy; he was educated at Otago Boys' High School and at the University of Otago, and in 1885 he qualified as a New Zealand barrister before leaving for Australia. Hume established himself as a playwright in Dunedin in 1883 with a commedietta “Once Bitten Twice Shy” and a burlesque “Dynamite; or the Crown Jewels.” Having suggested that these plays “if criticised at all should be treated at present with all the leniency due to a maiden effort,”⁶ the Otago Witness critic roundly condemned every aspect of Hume's dramaturgy with a thoroughness that seems unduly harsh. By 1896, Hume was working in Britain and had had some success on the London stage, but he was faring little better critically; William Archer found “The Fool of the Family” devoid of coherence, competence, ingenuity, and common sense, and dismissed Hume's “Teddy's Wives” as “an utterly futile and childish farce.”⁷

Despite the consensus of two such critics, Hume's plays cannot be dismissed as insignificant. One of his early pieces, the farcical comedy “The Bigamist,” was successful on the New Zealand stage in 1886, and the dramatization of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was very popular in Australasia and ran for five hundred performances at the Princess Theatre, London. In several of his novels Hume wrote of the difficulties facing the colonial playwright in terms that seem highly autobiographical. In particular, Miss Mephistopheles (1890) deals with a young man in Melbourne attempting to contrive production for his burlesque “Faust Upset”; in many details, including a general inversion of the characters' sexes, Hume appears to have been echoing Farjeon's “Faust” burlesque, of which he must have heard during his boyhood in Dunedin.

III THE FIRST PUBLISHED PLAYS

One may trace themes and techniques within early New Zealand drama from secondary sources, but the absence of scripts makes literary evaluation impossible. Between 1880 and 1930 scripts were occasionally published, generally by overseas publishers; it does not follow, however, that these scripts were necessarily typical of the best New Zealand drama of the period.

The first published New Zealand play, Josiah Clifton Firth's Weighed in the Balance: A Play for the Times, appeared in 1882 under the pseudonym of Arthur Fonthill. As the title suggests, the play is a political tract full of thinly veiled satirical references to New Zealand politicians; Sir Julius Vogel, for example, appears as “July Vocal.” The three acts are spread over three locations: a cavern, a baronial hall, and the Hall of Representatives. Although the character range is considerable, the play's action is minimal, consisting largely of debates on politics and principles of equality. The play obviously contained a good deal of topical allusion which is now only accessible to the historian, but there is no evidence that it made any real impact at the time, political or artistic.

Political satire has always been common on the New Zealand stage. As early as 1855 a playbill attests to a “grand local, legendary, descriptive, subscriptive, serio-comic, mock-heroic, democratical, autocratical piece de circonstance” full of topical invective,⁸ and the tradition continues with contemporary works like John Banas's “The Robbie Horror Show” (1976). Weighed in the Balance is also typical of numerous plays that followed it in its formal, rhetorical language and verse, in its deployment of aristocratic characters and emblems of a kind that has never been prominent in New Zealand, and in its totally unrealistic presentation of indigenous elements, such as the choric witches.

Other playwrights found that a formal, Latinate style was more suited to the treatment of historical subjects. W. H. Guthrie-Smith's Crispus (1891) is a three-act, blank-verse drama based on Gibbon. James Izett, a Christchurch journalist, wrote “Terrible Terry” in 1881,⁹ a three-act comedy set in Australia that utilized the Ned Kelly scare for its resolution; but Izett's only published play is King George the Third, A Tragedy (1899), a complex five-act drama derived from Thackeray's Four Georges. Izett's work is distinguished from that of Guthrie-Smith and Firth in that it shows some sense of stagecraft, although of a somewhat archaic nature: the ghosts and mad scenes are used in the manner of Otway, and the indications of formalized focal grouping suggest early Victorian stage style. An extreme example of formal, literary drama on a historical subject is R. T. Hammond's Under the Shadow of Dread (1908), a five-act drama in blank verse dealing with King Alfred's conflicts with the Danish invaders; the play's narrative content is unexciting, but the management of archaic dialogue shows a linguistic enterprise that is rare in early New Zealand drama.

Most aspects of Hammond's style now seem absurd or pretentious, but within the historical context of New Zealand literature his achievement was by no means insignificant. Hammond's linguistic competence becomes clear when measured against the dramas of Maurice R. Keesing, published in New Zealand in 1909, but probably written about fifteen years earlier. Keesing also attempted historical drama in The Destroyers, and displayed his prowess at languages with various excursions into Russian, pidgin German, and Esperanto; also, Keesing's work did at least reach the New Zealand stage, with “a national and patriotic song and chorus” performed in 1897.¹⁰ But Keesing's attempt to construct a three-act drama on local themes did little more than expose the banality of his literary affectations and a supercilious disregard for the social structure of New Zealand, Maori, and European. Rotorua: a Fantasy is located at the famous tourist attractions of the Waitomo Caves and the Rotorua thermal region, and its action culminates with the historical Tarawera eruption. The whole play is in rhyming couplets, and the nature of its cast may be judged from the list of supernumeraries: “Visiting fairies (Indian, Malay, and Burmese). Gnomes, Giants, Maori Fairies. Tourists. Porters. People of Township. Maoris (in background).”¹¹

Rotorua: A Fantasy is itself little more than an embarrassing literary curiosity of a kind that was not uncommon in the first two decades of this century. But it also anticipates a kind of local formula drama that persisted at least until the 1950s: the audience is invited to view Maori and pakeha (European) behavior through the eyes of on-stage tourists whose inherent curiosity takes them from one natural or social cataclysm to another. The tourist perspective excuses any distortion in the representation of local custom, and conveniently mollifies any audience prejudice that may be consolidated by the play's content. Examples of this kind of play are numerous, and include H. S. B. Ribbands's comedy opera Marama; or the Mere and the Maori Maid (1920) and Merton Hodge's “Earthquake” (1931).

IV THE LAND OF THE MOA

Few New Zealand playwrights of the late nineteenth century wrote with book publication in mind. The effective enforcement of copyright laws meant that by 1880 an Australasian production of a recent London or American stage success was a substantial financial investment, and often production rights were withheld if a world tour seemed likely; as early as 1890, for example, the Janet Achurch production of Ibsen's A Doll's House was seen throughout New Zealand, although most touring companies were assembled especially for the Australian circuit. These, and related issues, meant that several actor-managers turned playwright themselves or commissioned local work; their general motive was financial, and they compensated for a script's lack of an international reputation by insisting on a plethora of local color. The result was a quantity of plays that were determinedly ephemeral in their impact, sensational theater pieces which reveal a great deal about the social context of New Zealand drama but are themselves of little literary worth.

George Leitch's The Land of the Moa (1895) was preeminent among these. The prologue, printed in the program, gave a synopsis of the play's exposition:

The action in the prologue occurs during the period of the Maori war, when the Maoris fought against the English in defence of their tribal rights. The scene is laid in the North Island of New Zealand, in the “Pah” or settlement of Rewi, a highly-esteemed Maori warrior and chief. Rewi is entertaining a Captain Eden, hailing from America, whose plausible manners and a certain reckless daring have excited the admiration and confidence of his savage host, who, up to this time, has had no experience of the wiliness of the white man. Eden not only disposes of his cargo of comparatively useless guns, ammunition, etc., to Rewi, but he betrays his plans of defence and aggression to the English, assisted first by a treacherous Maori named Hangi, and secondly (but unwittingly) by Kura, Rewi's beautiful daughter, the pride of her father and people, whose affections Eden has ensnared, spite of her being betrothed to Roto, the brave young chief of a friendly tribe. In defiance of the warnings of Wangarita, and the mother of Roto, Kura consents to fly with her deceiver. In the effort to prevent their flight Wangarita's husband and Roto's brother are shot down by Eden, who escapes with Kura in his vessel. Over the dead bodies of the slain Rewi, Wangarita, and Roto, their tribes swear an oath of vengeance against the man, whom they ever afterwards dub the Black Angel, Rewi prophesying that he will return to meet his doom at their hands.¹²

All the stock characters of melodrama are here suggested, and the materialization of Rewi's prophecy needs only the introduction of a comic (played by Leitch) and his niece, Marvis Noble. As a story, The Land of the Moa is hackneyed, but in terms of technique and moral implications the play has a particular interest.

The morality of nineteenth-century melodrama involved the affirmation of audience norms, often by capitalizing on local racist, nationalistic, or social feelings; thus, it was not uncommon for American melodrama to use a Mexican, Indian, or half-caste villain. The subject of The Land of the Moa was colonial warfare, and the final affirmation was patriotic, with the singing of “Rule Britannia.” In such a context, one might expect a Maori villain, and yet the Black Angel is emphatically American, while a Maori princess is a heroine. In this respect, the play is typical of New Zealand melodrama: the villains were almost always American or European stereotypes, and Maori characters were generally presented as noble savages sympathetic to the cause of British imperialism. Leitch's manuscript shows that in the first draft Rewi was called “Te Kooti,” the name of a historical Maori chief who led guerrilla warfare—including cannibalism and extensive massacres—against European settlers in the years around 1870. The name was fictionalized in the play presumably to veil an unwelcome reality about Maori-pakeha relations. It is also characteristic of the period that Maori supernumeraries were employed for the war dances and group effects, but all the principal Maori parts were played by Europeans. Sociologically, the romanticized portrayal of Maori ethnicity relates to the willingness of Maoris to contribute to its presentation.

The dramaturgic technique of The Land of the Moa shows most clearly the influence of the Irish dramatist Dion Boucicault, whose work was widely known through the Australasian touring of Dion Boucicault, Junior, between 1885 and 1896. The climax of the drama lies in a typical sensation scene, at the end of the third act, where the set presents a mountain gorge with a bridge and practical waterfall. The bridge is scheduled for demolition within the hour, but Roto anticipates it, so that the act ends with the direction: “… a fount of fire seen at back and L of bridge, which is blown up and the horse with Marks [the Black Angel] falls into the river below. Water fowl alarmed fly up into the air.”¹³

Technically, it was necessary for the villain to survive to provide another strong curtain at the end of the fourth act; here, he is shot, blinded with blood from tomahawk blows, dragged to the scene of an eruption, and hurled into a blow hole, “where he is engulphed by a fount of steam and fire.”¹⁴ Whether this is the end of the Black Angel, or whether he dies in the course of the eruption that dominates the last act, is uncertain.

It is entirely characteristic of nineteenth-century melodrama that the moral resolution should be effected through natural causation rather than through human endeavor: earthquakes, avalanches, and volcanoes are thought to be in sympathy with Victorian virtue, and all the virtuous need do is let Nature take her course. But in New Zealand, where a tiny population is scattered through a cluster of rugged islands, Nature is relatively a more insistent force than in the densely populated countries from which the pioneers came. For this reason, “Man Alone” has always been a dominant theme in New Zealand prose fiction, and for the same reason Nature may participate in New Zealand stage drama with more plausibility than many Europe-orientated critics will allow.

While The Land of the Moa was touring New Zealand, the same audiences also saw Thomas William Robertson's Caste and The Player, Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The School Mistress, Dandy Dick, and The Amazons, Sutton Vane's The Span of Life, William Gillette's Held by the Enemy, Henry Arthur Jones's The Case of Rebellious Susan, Sydney Grundy's The New Woman and The Village Priest, and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband. Very few overseas melodramas were reaching the New Zealand stage; instead, the new drama of social realism was in vogue, a genre in which local playwrights were at a severe disadvantage because of the self-consciousness that seems inevitable in small populations. According to the aesthetic criteria that came through Wilde, Pinero, and even Robertson, The Land of the Moa was widely condemned by critics as an old-fashioned pictorial melodrama, dependent on natural spectacle rather than complexity of character interaction.

The Land of the Moa used nineteen painted sets, presented on the “grooves” system, which was fast becoming obsolete. At least one canvas was completely repainted for each new theater, with dialogue appropriately adapted, so that the first scene could be located in whichever town the company happened to be playing. The scene of the catastrophe involved the reproduction of a part of Rotorua destroyed in the Tarawera eruption: practical geysers, mud pools, and scenic terraces, facsimiles constructed strongly enough to carry horses. This, however, offended critics less than the sheer quantity of the scenic splendors through which the central action, the pursuit of the villain, passes. The characters caught in the eruption include tourists, the hero and his friend are young Englishmen on a writing and sketching holiday, and in the last scene the characters depart from the New Plymouth wharf, presumably sailing back to England. The whole production could easily be dismissed as an exercise in tourism.

It is absurd to complain, as some critics did, that the characters of the melodrama are undermotivated; the Black Angel careers through Maoriland simply because it is in the nature of melodrama that images of evil be propelled into a context of extreme beauty and innocence. The development of the action simply involves an increasingly intense correlation between the viciousness of the villain and the Romantic savagery of the environment which he exploits. In the theater of 1895 the Black Angel seems to have functioned as a scapegoat for the audience's sense of imperialist guilt, the European characters reflect colonial philanthropy at its most fatuous (with the ship awaiting the end of the South Seas adventure), and the scenic environment explains the lure of the land and its own brand of natural selection. The irony that qualified these central melodramatic fantasies was that the moa—the wingless giant bird of the title—had long been extinct, as obsolete an emblem as the utopian ideals of Rousseau.

V THE SUCCESSORS TO GEORGE LEITCH

Of the numerous other New Zealand playwrights who attempted to localize melodrama, the most celebrated is Barrie Marschel. “The Murder at the Octagon” (1895) gave a Dunedin setting to a crime story remarkably similar to Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, and “Humarire Taniwha” (1898) had its blind, part-Maori heroine of the title tied to a Dunedin railway track. For “Crime at Cathedral Square” (1903) Marschel used a Christchurch location, but he then left the stage to work in film distribution, and his play “The Kid from Timaru” was best known in its film version of 1918. Marschel's work remains noteworthy as the epitome of successful stage parochialism, and in the synopses of his plots one notes the importance of French, Corsicans, and other traditional melodramatic nationalities which had little to do with New Zealand.

Marschel's work seems to have been constricted in terms of both scale and budget, but an attempt to match the successes of The Land of the Moa came in 1904 from another Australian actor-manager, Alfred Dampier. Dampier and Leitch had long been engaged in rivalry over the stage exploitation of local material (they had each toured a dramatization of His Natural Life in 1886), and with “The Growing of the Rata” (1904) Dampier seems to have adapted a play by a young New Zealander, Charles Owen, to suit a wider Australasian audience. In New Zealand, the play was condemned for a lack of motivation and morality, although one suspects that in its presentation of Maori-pakeha miscegenation it was somewhat ahead of its time. For the subsequent Australian tour, the play was rescripted and retitled “The Unseen Hand”; though the production was highly praised for its sensational and scenic effects, the play did not receive a popular or critical response like that of The Land of the Moa.

In terms of spectacle and exploitation of ethnic detail, the achievement of The Land of the Moa was most nearly parallelled by local opera. Maori themes were no novelty in this genre. As early as 1880, a Mr. Griffen of Wanganui had written a musical extravaganza entitled “Hinemoa,” for which the New Zealand Times predicted a substantial future: “It will form the groundwork of a permanent entertainment, which might be worked successfully throughout the Colonies, one of the principal features being the introduction of a series of panoramic views, illustrating the Middle Island Sounds and the Hot Lakes of the North Island. The dramatic portion of the entertainment has also the advantage of engaging only four principal performers.”¹⁵ Though Griffen wrote more for the local stage, “Hinemoa” appears not to have been revived.

In 1893 F. E. Jones's “The Monarch of Utopia” was a sufficiently successful local light opera to achieve revival, but it had clearly been forgotten by 1904, when “Tapu” by Alfred Hill and Arthur H. Adams was promoted as “the first New Zealand opera.”¹⁶ Once again, the location was the Rotorua region, with the second act featuring the natural terraces that were destroyed in the Tarawera eruption; into this terrain comes a touring opera company which, finding itself stranded, engages in a vocal drama with the Maori inhabitants. A characteristic review observed that Adams's “plot is incoherent and ridiculous, and smacks less of New Zealand than of the interior of Africa, as known to the artists of the comic journals.”¹⁷ Hill's score was considered to be far superior to the libretto, although it was obviously limited by the impossibility of accommodating tribal musical structures within the formal constrictions of European opera, a problem which was resolved only with Jenny McLeod's “Earth and Sky” in 1968.

The Hill-Adams partnership had existed for some years before “Tapu,” but for his next opera Hill appears to have succumbed to criticism and used a different librettist: “A Moorish Maid” (1906) was successful enough in Auckland to merit a professional New Zealand tour, although John Birch's script was much criticized, and the principal dramatic highlight of the evening came in “the dance of the hockey girls.”¹⁸ Birch continued as a librettist, notably with “The Belle of Cuba” in 1921, while Hill became conductor of New Zealand's first professional symphony orchestra in 1906 and then spent much of his long musical career in Australia.¹⁹

Adams similarly did his later work in the Australian theater, as literary secretary to J. C. Williamson and editor of the Red Page of The Bulletin, Sydney; his determination to become known as an Australian playwright is reflected in the title of his collection, Three Plays for the Australian Stage (1914). The plays themselves, however, have general colonial locations which are accommodated easily into the New Zealand context which was their obvious origin. Galahad Jones is a comedy derived from Adams's novel of the same title, Mrs. Pretty and the Premier is a political comedy which was regarded as “the first New Zealand play to be produced at a West End theatre,”²⁰ and The Wasters is a “modern comedy” about the corruption of a newly rich family.

In his introduction Adams described his unpublished work, which included a “Cromwellian Romantic play,” a “modern comedy” with a Maori setting, and a considerable number of one-act plays. In his use of the term “modern comedy” Adams showed himself to be the first New Zealand playwright consciously writing in the wake of Ibsen and Shaw. The Wasters presents a successful businessman talking to his wife about his accountant (whom she wants to reinstate to his former position as his partner) and about their son (who prefers gambling to shopkeeping). A subplot develops, but the central drama pivots on issues of blackmail and paternity, with a scène à faire that has bitter undertones. The weaknesses of the play lie in its overassertive morality: the power of true love, the liberating force of honesty, and the dangers of pomposity. On the other hand, Adams's humor has a degree of subtlety, and his dialogue shows a concern for realism. Over the next half-century the principal retardant to the emergence of realism in New Zealand drama was the self-consciousness of a small population when confronted with a self-image.

Notes

1. New Zealand Spectator, July 8, 1848, p. 1.

2. Margaret Williams's excellent edition of The Sunny South (Sydney, 1975) contains a bibliography.

3. Joe Graham, An Old Stock-Actor's Memories (London, 1930), p. 42f. The “Middle Island” is now called the “South Island.”

4. Ibid., p. 43.

5. Otago Witness, September 2, 1865, August 10, 1867.

6. Ibid., October 13, 1883, p. 23.

7. William Archer, The Theatrical ‘World’ of 1896 (London, 1897), pp. 26-29, 277.

8. Uncatalogued playbill, Hocken Library, Dunedin.

9. Otago Witness, January 29, 1881, p. 20.

10. New Zealand Sporting and Dramatic Review, June 3, 1897, 9.

11. Maurice R. Keesing, Dramas and Poems (Auckland, 1909), p. 12.

12. “Uncatalogued Set 12, Item 12,” Mitchell Library, Sydney.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Quoted in Otago Witness, November 27, 1880, p. 20.

16. New Zealand Sporting and Dramatic Review, June 16, 1904, 18.

17. Ibid.

18. New Zealand Sporting and Dramatic Review, March 15, 1906, 18.

19. Maurice Hurst, Music and the Stage in New Zealand (Auckland, 1944), p. 102.

20. Pat Lawlor, Confessions of a Journalist (Christchurch, 1935), p. 165.