[In the following essay, McNaughton surveys the work of several New Zealand playwrights who wrote during the time of World War II, including Allen Curnow, D'Arcy Cresswell, Ian Hamilton, Howard Wadman, and Claude Evans.]

World War II altered the character of most New Zealand theaters, changing the nature of the active membership but generally not reducing it. Unbalanced resources led to a period of conservatism in the larger civic theaters and a consequent resistance to local scripts, but the war years also saw a substantial development in university drama and the emergence of socially committed theaters in Wellington and Auckland. At Canterbury University College, Ngaio Marsh directed a series of celebrated productions, mostly Shakespearean, and at Auckland University College Arnold Goodwin developed a marionette theater which also toured Shakespeare productions.

It is almost inevitable that a literary theater movement such as Ngaio Marsh encouraged at Canterbury, stressing voice and stylization, should produce its own original works. The establishment of the Caxton Press had temporarily given Christchurch the highest density of poets in the country, and most of them were involved in the theater. Here James K. Baxter got his first experience of the stage, in Ngaio Marsh's production of Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Mouches in 1948, and he was immediately stimulated into beginning his own first play; in this he was also partly following the example of established writers like Sargeson, R. A. K. Mason, Charles Brasch, Allen Curnow, and D'Arcy Cresswell, all of whom had then attempted dramatic writing.

John Pocock, actor and director for the Canterbury University College Little Theatre, considered the period between 1943 and 1948 to be a “small but unmistakable Golden Age” which taught “a training in rhetoric and poetry as the principal means of theatrical expression.” He has described the group's priorities: a tendency to regard every script, whether prose or verse, as “a formal pattern of speech,” scorn for the “problem play,” and an insistence on plays “uncommitted to realism or the contemporary scene.” The tradition, in Pocock's view, culminated with the production of Allen Curnow's The Axe in 1948, a poetic drama which “provided the actors with some richly satisfying moments of dramatic utterance, closely linked with some of the central ideas in New Zealand poetry at that time”; the production “consisted essentially in the discovery of how potent the great poetic images, the rhythms and melodies of verse, can be in the creation of purely theatrical experience.”¹

I ALLEN CURNOW'S THE AXE

Curnow was one of the senior members of the Caxton group of Christchurch poets, and The Axe was an extension of themes and techniques that were already well known from his poetry. Not in Narrow Seas (1939) had shown his interest in Polynesian historical material, with an alternation of prose and verse approaching a coherent story-line and one section written in verse dialogue. Island and Time (1941) used verse monologues and dialogues involving abstract or superhuman personae, confrontations between elemental forces which were to provide the basis of The Axe.

The specific narrative source of The Axe was a Yale University lecture delivered by Sir Peter Buck; the subject was Polynesian anthropology (in particular that of Mangaia, in the Cook Islands), and Curnow adhered closley to Buck's details, even using the same names. Buck's account of Mangaia reads:

It had so happened that in the last year the combined tribes of Ngati-tane and Ngati-manahune had defeated the existing government of Ngati-vara. … The highest ranking chief was Numangatini, holding the offices of both Inland-high-priest and Shore-high-priest. It was at this peculiar stage that the two Tahitian missionaries landed on Mangaia and came under the protection of the dominant Ngati-tane tribe. In the course of time they made converts. … The national god house was burnt to the ground, and the gods that had reposed in it were thrown in a heap before the missionaries. … Matters reached a head when the Ngati-vara assembled their forces and offered battle to regain government over the island. … During the battle, the Tahitian missionary, Davida, remained on his knees, supplicating Jehovah to grant victory to the Ngati-tane; in a thatched hut perched on a high rock, Tereavai, priest of the Ngati-vara, invoked his tribal god Te A'ia to give success to their arms. The spiritual power of Te A'ia, however, had departed with that of the other Polynesian gods, and the heathen were defeated.²

To Buck's narrative, Curnow added a romantic subplot between a youth, Hema, and a girl, Hina; he changed the ending to intensify the tragedy; and he introduced the axe motif. The play is set in various locations around the island, but it was written specially for a single utility set; in its final published version, it is in three acts with a total of eleven scenes, though the first version to be performed consisted of only two acts.

The central symbolism lies in the axe motif, representing imported culture, and it is inevitably used as the instrument of tragic death at the end. The axe also provides some justification for the subplot: it is Hema who receives the axe from the missionary, it is he who loses it to the Ngati-vara, and Hina is one of those killed by it in the last act. It is obviously important that such a basic tool should be seen in use among ordinary people, and the love relationship also illustrates Davida's (historical) “blue laws” restricting sexual freedom. From the first production, however, there was dissatisfaction with the axe symbolism, expressed most succinctly by A. W. Stockwell:

The second dramatic climax occurs in a scene which is the core of the play's meaning, since in it the full significance of the axe's symbolism is revealed concretely, in terms of individual human experience. Hema discovers the girl's corpse—and beside it, the fatal weapon. He renounces Christianity. Crazed by grief and disgust he determines on revenge; he imagines himself a god. Seizing the axe, he rushes out to find Numangatini, who dies after a fight off-stage in the final scene. Hema enters and throws the axe down over the dead body … the symbolism of Hema's axe is unconvincing and incapable of sustaining the weight placed upon it. As a result the whole play seems hollow, both on the printed page and in the theatre.³

M. K. Joseph also found the axe motif “self-conscious,” but expressed more satisfaction in another area of symbolism: “another image, that of the island, emerges with considerable power. … With its cliff and mountain, spray and seaswell, cavern and cloud, it rings solid. And it further suggests a unity of existence which is somehow detached from both the Christians and the pagans.”⁴ James K. Baxter, who had been at the premiere with Denis Glover, argued vehemently in the play's defense as “a situation archetypal for the Polynesian and for us.”⁵ Selecting The Axe as one of the five most important events in recent New Zealand poetry, Baxter argued an Edenic interpretation, but without amply refuting the attacks on the symbolism and the quality of the nonchoric verse.

Curnow's concern was for the articulation of Pacific archetypes, and his characterization was no more individualized than is necessary in mythic drama. He gave the best poetry in the play to the chorus of two ancestral voices which begins the play and ends each act, and he extended the chorus's function considerably after the first production. It is in the chorus that the deepest significance of the axe is invested, and the fact that this significance is generally inaccessible to the characters but transparent to the audience means that the play is weighted by a rather obvious irony; this is a fundamental problem when a playwright's purpose lies in the elaboration, rather than the revaluation, of mythic sources. However, in the final version the chorus, with its privileged vision of both past and future, shifts the focus from the individual to the universal, from character interaction to superhuman manipulation by the elemental forces which have chosen these characters as pawns in their primordial conflict.

When reduced to its thematic essence, the conflict of The Axe is not among the particular humans but between the abstract figures of Curnow's earlier poetic dialogue, Island and Time. These forces are collated not only by the ethnic convergence of the play's story-line, but also by a mythic motif that recurs in numerous Pacific cultures: that of the island being eternally bound to the seabed, tied there by a god-figure like the Maori Maui. Curnow's axe is not simply—or even primarily—the instrument of a tribal melodrama; it is the unwelcome liberator of the Island into Time.

II D'ARCY CRESSWELL'S THE FOREST

Apart from R. A. K. Mason, whose propagandist sketches are of little theatrical or literary significance, and Charles Brasch, whose The Quest is a poetic script for a mime play, the only other New Zealand poet writing seriously for the stage in the 1940s was D'Arcy Cresswell. Although Cresswell's The Forest was not published until 1952, a first draft was done in 1936.

As in The Axe, The Forest involves two elemental forces settling on an obscure Pacific location for a duel; here it is scientific progress versus Nature, the materialist against the poet. Cresswell's battle with Copernicus occupied much of his writing career and often resulted in a forthright dogmatism which is sharply at odds with the sense of comic strategy revealed in The Forest. The main character is Mr. Salter, who owns a large area of forest which he is under pressure to sell; in the first version, Salter held the stage from beginning to end and was apparently entrusted with a good deal of authorial pronouncement, derived autobiographically from Cresswell's work for the Forestry Department.

In its final form the play begins with a dialogue between the archangel Gabriel and the restored archangel Lucifer; following a compromise between heaven and hell, Lucifer now controls the earth, particularly through the forces of Science. Gabriel's posture is the first to be punctured: from the start he appears as a superannuated archangel with all the attributes of senility, and it soon becomes clear that his heavenly preoccupations have left him completely out of touch with the power of Nature. Lucifer is altogether a more vital character, but he reveals a dangerous arrogance in his contempt for poets. Since no poet has yet appeared, attention turns to the absent Salter, “a forest Romeo / whose Juliet's his trees,”⁶ and Salter's wife, whose attitude to the forest parallels Lucifer's. Taking off his cloak of invisibility, Lucifer becomes Bishop, a fast-talking businessman; Gabriel, who cannot get rid of his invisibility, finds himself hovering helplessly on the fringe of the action. As Lucifer begins to make progress with the wife, the arrival of the Salter's son, Clive, introduces a new dimension, implicitly homosexual, which confuses Lucifer. Salter's own first entrance, delayed until well into the second act, is thus given a context of some moral and strategic complexity, and he seems on the verge of selling his forest. At the start of the final act Gabriel is in conversation with Clive's friend George, who—being a poet—has no difficulty in penetrating the invisibility. George persuades Salter not to sacrifice his forest, Lucifer retires, thwarted by the power of the poet, Bishop dies, and Gabriel decides to stay on earth, throwing off his robe, “revealing figure of a beautiful young man, naked save for a girdle.”⁷

The Forest is a modest—but significant—achievement. Its verse is of a much lower poetic intensity than Curnow's, but of a higher theatrical cohesiveness; it was specially written for playing rather than reading, although production was delayed until 1963, three years after Cresswell's death. Cresswell's surviving dramatic fragments show that he did attempt tragedy and historical drama, but the basis of his success in The Forest lay in choosing the mode of light, literary comedy, without any necessary repercussions outside the animated context. The lightness of tone and audacity of conception were rare in an emergent dramatic literature which was often obsessed with seriousness.

III THE PLAYS OF IAN HAMILTON AND HOWARD WADMAN

Of New Zealand's socially committed theaters, the best-known was Unity Theatre, Wellington, which in the 1940s relied on overseas scripts for its full-length productions. In Auckland, the People's Theatre, deriving from the Workers' Educational Association, produced several of R. A. K. Mason's sketches and also conducted playwriting competitions; the most notable product of these was Ian Hamilton's Falls the Shadow (1939), a three-act antiwar drama set in contemporary Britain. Until nearly the end of the second act, the play closely resembles the tradition of the British “well-made play,” involving an upper-middle-class family in various domestic and romantic situations in a country house near an airfield on the brink of war. But as the warning siren sounds. the realistic illusion is dropped and a spotlight picks out a recruiting officer, a politician, a strike leader, a strike breaker, and a padre, each arguing a different attitude to the war. In the final act, a year has passed since the English victory, and the country is under the control of its own breed of military fascists who have emerged from the war.

The play ends on a cautious note of optimism and regeneration similar to that of much German expressionism twenty years earlier, but the ending is not eased by any conventional domestic resolution, such as one might have expected from the first act; the family has been shattered morally and physically, and is under surveillance by the fascists. Even the heavily conventional areas of Falls the Shadow are interestingly written, the central characters are well developed, and the final act is highly atmospheric even when divorced from the propagandist implications of its prewar context. But perhaps the play's most notable technical feature is its prefatorial “Monologue,” spoken by the playwright to a recalcitrant actor, crystallizing the play's propagandist drift in a vernacular style similar to Sargeson's:

… So what are you going to do after that? The workers'd take control. Yes, but which workers? The best bashers, I suppose. But then don't good bashers make bad bosses. I mean there'll have to be a boss around somewhere. Wait and see? But Christ, Andy, I reckon I CAN see. After all, Hitler's a pretty good basher. …

Well, let's leave that, Andy. The thing I really want to know is, what made you take a part in the play? You took it damn well, I'll admit, damn well. But there's a terrible big gap between getting up on a soap box in Quay Street and telling the chaps what's coming to them if they don't revolute, and this play, isn't there? I must say I wouldn't have the guts to get up on a soap box in Quay Street, and p'r'aps that's why I wrote the play. There's good stuff in it? Yes but the theme, Andy, the theme. It might make the chaps realise what'll happen, if they don't get up and bash the bosses? …⁸

Falls the Shadow is New Zealand's Waiting for Lefty, though without any suggestion of stylistic plagiarism; it is a vigorous, iconoclastic piece which allows a rare insight into the workings of an ephemeral and largely nonliterary movement in New Zealand.

The uncommitted civic theaters, by contrast, relied almost exclusively on imported scripts such as the wartime plays of Emlyn Williams. After the war, however, several new playwrights emerged through these societies. In Wellington, Howard Wadman, (editor of The Year Book of the Arts in New Zealand) had written his “modern morality play” Youth Wants to Know for the Religious Drama Society during the war, and followed it with the more popular Life Sentence which received its premiere in Wellington in 1949 amid considerable public attention. Life Sentence has a New Zealand setting, and attempts to deal with the problems of national integration within an immediate context of romantic rivalry and mountaineering adventure; in all other respects it is a thoroughly conventional British “well-made play” until in the last act—as in Falls the Shadow—the structural constrictions dissolve to admit the presentation of a complex moral issue. Life Sentence is technically a clumsy play, with banal characterization, a crude story-line, and pretentious stylistic effects like the use of a verse-speaking ghost in the last act. One of its epigraphs, from T. S. Eliot, indicates an obvious influence, but the other reveals a writer keenly sensitive to the mood of New Zealand audiences: a quotation from James K. Baxter emphasizes that Wadman was aware of issues that were to become dominant in New Zealand drama within a decade, although he lacked the skills with which Baxter and Bruce Mason would articulate them.

IV THE PLAYS OF CLAUDE EVANS

While Hamilton and Wadman were writing largely for specialist purposes, a more pragmatic South Island playwright was emerging as an astute judge of audience tastes and performance resources. All of Claude Evans's nine full-length plays require elaborate interior sets and large casts of characters who mostly approximate to stock types: scripts carefully gauged to the needs and abilities of the flourishing Christchurch amateur theater. Evans's first four plays were produced in the 1940s, three of them under the direction of Neta Neale, and have several sets, all with a British location. His later plays have a single set, a New Zealand location, and a refinement of characterization; Neta Neale had become committed to the establishment of the Canterbury Children's Theatre, and these plays were mounted with the support of the Canterbury Repertory Theatre.

Of the early works, The Clock Strikes the Hour (1946) follows the career of a modern Faustian adventurer in the business world, Underwood (1947) is a family saga reflecting the action of a ballet and covering the conflicting emotional demands on its colorless central character over a period of thirty-five years, There'll Be a Spring (1948) is a sentimental drama on the theme of scientific rejuvenation, suggesting the influence of Emlyn Williams, and Far Journey (1949) is a memory play about the war in China in 1938.

That Man Harlington (1952), Evans's first play with a New Zealand location, is also his first to depend wholly on realistic causation; the stereotyped situation of an embezzling lawyer is augmented by a comical dimension and by careful portraiture of the title character. In Overtime (1954) the arena shifts to a furniture factory and the comedy arises from pressures of modernization and unionism; this is Evans's most successful and original play, making a topical impact at its premiere and admitting a greater breadth of characterization than any of his other works. Evans's later plays consist of the atmospheric business drama Rich Man, Poor Man (1956), a social comedy about the originally French settlement of Akaroa So Laughs the Wind (1958), and a “play of law” set in a Supreme Court, “My Learned Friend” (1961). Like his master Emlyn Williams or his compatriot Merton Hodge, Claude Evans ironically refined a style just as it was beginning to appear dated. Williams, of course, diversified into another theatrical style, a development which was also felt in New Zealand, in the initial influence on Bruce Mason.

Notes

1. Bruce Mason and John Pocock, Theatre in Danger (Hamilton, 1957), pp. 5, 36-38.

2. Peter Buck, Anthropology and Religion (New Haven, 1939), pp. 75-78.

3. A. W. Stockwell, “The Axe,” Landfall 2 (1948):136-140.

4. M. K. Joseph, “The Axe,” Landfall 5 (1951):65-67.

5. James K. Baxter, Recent Trends in New Zealand Poetry (Christchurch, 1951), p. 14.

6. D'Arcy Cresswell, The Forest (Auckland, 1952), p. 12.

7. Ibid., p. 96.

8. Ian Hamilton, Falls the Shadow (Auckland, 1939), preface.