35 Pakeha Plays of the South Pacific: Roger Hall- Glide Time

Ms. Saswati Saha

Content :

1. Introduction: What is Pakeha?

2. Pakeha Plays: A Brief Understanding

3. Roger Hall: Introducing the Playwright

4. An Brief Discussion on the Dramatic Practice of Roger Hall

5. Glilde Time: A Story of Success Etched on Stage

6. Glide Time: Reception and Responses

7. Summary of the Module

8. Reference

1.   Introduction: What is Pakeha?

Any discussion on Pakeha literary genre is impossible without knowing what Pakeha means. A rough sketch of the Pakeha cultural identity is inevitable before beginning any discussion on Pakeha literature. Therefore this section will try to understand the term Pakeha. Pakeha is a term used to denote the white New Zealanders mainly comprising of the settlers from Europe. The first recorded use of the word Pakeha is in the Treaty of Waitangi. A Pakeha, initially, was a white man who came from England and settled and worked in New Zealand. Later the term came to be used more generally to denote any fair skinned person who was born in New Zealand. Mary-Ellen O’Connor (1990) defines Pakeha as “the dominant white race in New Zealand. This would cover anybody of Anglo-Celtic origin (England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales) and, as the integrated, Northern Europeans (Scandinavians, Germans, and Dutch), white American, Canadians and South Africans. But in order to understand a Pakeha, one must also understand the term Maori because a white New Zealander is a Pakeha only in relation to a Maori, or an indigenous Polynesian inhabitant of New Zealand. The term Maori was used by the indigenous population to describe them as ‘different’ from the European settlers but with time the term got adopted by the Europeans to describe the indigenous people. But according to living Maoris of New Zealand, a Moari do not primarily use the term to describe themselves but only use the tribe name as they are essentially tribal people. A Maori is a Maori only in relation to Pakeha thus denoting the linguistic, racial, ethnic and cultural difference between the indigenous people of Aotearoa and the European settlers. Michael King in his books Being Pakeha (1985) defines Pakeha as “denoting non-Maori New Zealanders.” (https://maorinews.com/writings/papers/other/pakeha.htm)

Some people consider Pakeha to be a derogatory term or an insult hurled at the fair skinned people of non-Polynesian descent in New Zealand. According to them the term Pakeha means ‘long pig’ or ‘white pig’. Some New Zealanders of white descent are reluctant to call themselves Pakeha , also because the term originated in a language that is not their own. Such people prefer words like Caucasians or New Zealand European. But both these terms are problematic since it covers wide range of people and second or third generation of settlers cannot be called Europeans anymore. However, considerably early records, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, show the European missionaries and government officials also referred to themselves as Pakeha.

The changing usage of the term Pakeha complicates the notion of ethnicity. If an ethnic group comprise of people who share common ancestry, culture and history, then Pakeha can never refer to an ethnic group as it comprises a mixed bag of fair skinned people of different ethnic or racial origin. Therefore the term Pakeha or Maori “offer us a way to differentiate between the historical origins of settlers, the Polynesian and European.” (https://maorinews.com/writings/papers/other/pakeha.htm)

2. Pakeha Plays: A Brief Understanding 

Pakeha plays mainly deal with the representation of Pakeha cultural identity on the stage or the expression of Pakeha culture in theatrical performances. For instance Gary Henderson’s play Home Land (2005) deals with Pakeha sense of belonging to the country of New Zealand and their relationship to what they too now consider to be their homeland. The play talks about an old man Ken who is 80 years old and is reluctant to leave his farm which he considers to his home and hence the basis of his power. These plays deal with the touching issue of the Pakeha being considered as the other and the outsider to the Maoris who are indigenous to the soil. Pakeha plays usually encapsulate the European theatre tradition on the one hand and the Pakeha experience of being a post-colonial people rooted in Aotearoa/New Zealand on the other. In most of these plays, the Pakeha people are seen as people moved away from their places of origin, changed by their living experience in Aotearoa, and in search of a sense of belonging in their adopted land. Land featured as an important metaphorical character in many of the Pakeha plays as Smith points out, “one of the first ways of establishing a cultural identity within a new territory is to lay claim to the landscape, because turning ‘space’ into ‘place’ gives a people a tangible form of ownership to an area.” (Smith, 176) The land is the focus of the cultural conflict between the Maori and the settlers.

Some of the issues that Pakeha plays deal with are hybridity, biculturalism, the problem of expressing the difference between Pakeha cultural identity and other Western cultural identities, distance and its relationship to Pakeha sensibility, and some of the most recognizable Pakeha characteristics. (Smith, 55) However the problems faced by Pakeha theatre include the lack of a local Pakeha language and that they work with imported concepts. They often take up concerns that are local and then improvise and reconfigure them inside the forms received from Europe. The Pakeha theatre has to deal with the cultural other who is an intrinsic part of the culture of the land and against whom the Pakeha are represented both in the world and in the world of theatre. In order to localize the plays and make them a part of Aotearoa, the Pakeha plays often make use of local themes and Maori iconography.

It is for long that Pakeha theatre had been Euro-centric and Europe had for long dominated the matter and structure of the plays. Pakeha theatre, as it were, was speaking through Europe. It represented a European world-view. What differentiates Pakeha theatre from that of the European theatrical performances is the theme and one of the major themes is how the Pakeha tries to connect to the new land and establish a relationship with it. Thus Pakeha theatre moves gradually from complete rejection of the Maori as alien to integrating some of their Otherness of the Maori and coming to terms with the other quality of the land.

3.   Roger Hall: Introducing the Playwright 

Roger Leighton Hall was born on 17th January 1939 in Essex, England. He received his education from London University College School and then began his career in insurance. He emigrated to New Zealand in 1957 and therefore qualifies as a very recent fair skinned Pakeha in Aotearoa. In New Zealand too Hall continued with his work in insurance and performed in amateur theatre in Wellington. He began his playwriting career with writing plays for school children. He became a naturalized New Zealander in 1980.

Hall soon became the most famous playwright of New Zealand as none of the plays written by him went un-staged. His plays always filled houses. No wonder his autobiography is titled Bums on Seats (1998). The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature states that, “a desire to write and to act was kindled by his father’s talent as an impersonator, frequent family visits to the theatre, especially revues, and by his love of post-war British radio comedies such as ‘ITMA’ and ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’”. But the opportunity to do both came only after Hall moved to New Zealand. Hall is known for his sense of humour that runs through all his plays. But even if audience laughs at the comedy that pervades the surface of his plays, the deep social criticism and feelings of pathos never goes unnoticed. His plays have also travelled far and wide and have been performed at various international venues. Hall has also scripted for films and television.

Hall’s career as a playwright began in the 70s and since then he has written 27 plays and had been equally successful for three decades continuously which is a phenomenal achievement. Hall’s best known work in New Zealand so far is Glide Time first performed in the year 1976. It was his breakthrough piece of work which set the pattern of most of Hall’s works. In 1977 came his most internationally known play Middle Aged Spread which was later made into a film and a successful West End production. In 1977 he was a Burns Fellow at Dunedin. Here he conducted a writing workshop. Later he accounted the difficulties he had faced during this workshop and wrote State of the Play which is a play about playwriting. Although this piece of work had been one of his favourites, yet it had not gained much commercial success after its premier at Wellington’s Downstage Theatre in 1978. The Share Club was written in 1987 before the Stock Market Crash and in 1988 came After the Crash. 1991 saw another most famous work by Roger Hall, Conjugal Rites. It was a melancholy stage sitcom which was made into a television series for Britain’s Granada television. His Market Forces came in 1995. According to the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, “In the lighter Market Forces (1995) Hall tests the old maxim that ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’, depicting the characters of Glide Time and ‘Gliding On’ in the environment of the restructured public service”. Roger Hall wrote two plays for all-female casts: Social Climbers (1995) and By Degrees (1993). His another big time stage hit was C’mon Black!, a solo play about a rugby supporter on tour in South Africa which captured pathos and political and social comments with comedy, very characteristic of Hall. Before the turn of the century, Hall wrote three further plays; Dynamite (1996), The Book Club (1999) and You Gotta Be Joking! (1999). Hall then took up retellings of traditional fairy tales, with Aladdin (2006) and Jack and The Beanstalk (2007). Hall wrote two plays in 2007, Who Wants to be a Hundred? (Anyone who’s 99) and Who Needs Sleep Anyway? Two further plays were released in 2009, Dick Whittington and His Cat and Four Flat Whites in Italy. A Shortcut to Happiness was released in 2011, described by the Auckland Theatre Company as quoted in Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature as – ‘Roger Hall is back to delight us once again. There is a clash of cultures and prejudices as a group of laid back North Shore retirees confront the strict discipline of a Russian folk dancing class. This is classic Hall – incisive, funny and full of compassion.’ You Can Always Hand Them Back! – with songs by British composer, Peter Skellern – was released in 2012. It had the usual humour but the underlying remorse. In 2016, forty years on from the production of Glide Time, Hall wrote Last Legs. Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature says it is “set in an upmarket retirement home, well-to-do seniors in Hall’s play indulge in greed, jealousy, love and lust; alongside gossip, backstabbing and scandal. It played to packed houses and, following Glide Time, had to have a return season”. 

He was also selected for the 1982 Fulbright Travel Fellowship to the United States. Hall was awarded the 1987 Turnovsky Prize for Outstanding Contribution to the Arts and was honoured as Companion of the Queen’s Service Order (QSO) for Community Service in 1987. Hall was awarded a New Zealand 1990 Commemoration Medal. Hall was awarded a 2002 Toastmaster International Communicator and Leadership Award and in 2003 was honoured as a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM) for his services as a playwright. Roger Hall was a Visiting Fulbright Professor at Georgetown University, Washington, DC in 2003. In 2011, Hall was awarded two Lifetime Achievement Awards – one at the Hackmann Awards, Auckland, and another at the Dunedin Theatre Awards. In 2014 Hall was presented a Scroll of Honour from  the Variety  Artists  Club  of  New  Zealand for a lifetime of excellence in the performing arts. Hall received a 2015 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.

4. A Brief Discussion on the Dramatic Practice of Roger Hall 

Roger Hall has majorly focused on the angst and exacerbations of the middle class. In an interview given to Gilbert Wong for New Zealand Herald, Hall says, “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”. 

Hall always seems to be critical about the middle class point of view of life. Middle class is that monotonous state of being that is mostly safe, unexciting and predictable. 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 captures all of these and many more of the middle class with a blend of humour and sadness. The small gains and the bigger loss that a middle class man/woman goes through and the painful process through which they try to compose themselves form the core of his works.

Hall’s plays are full of humour, but the comedy has a sorrowful toughness, much like Chekhov’s, and are a serious social critic, and treats the middle class with some sympathy. He is famous for his one-liners that captures the truth about human manners and also displays his wit. Some critics are of the opinion that his characters are stereotypical, and his female characters have specially provoked criticism.

The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature states that, “Glide Time set the pattern for most of Hall’s work, a series of gently satirical sketches linked by running gags and the gradual revelation of the characters’ generally dismal predicaments. The blend of comedy and pathos probably owes much to Tony Hancock, though Alan Ayckbourn is often cited, as is Chekhov, to whom Hall paid tribute in A Dream of Sussex Downs (1986)”.

5.   Glilde Time: A Story of Success Etched on Stage 

Glide Time was written during the 1970 when Wellington was a city full of public servants in several departments. Hall struck a chord in the minds of the city people by capturing the  ethos of the life of such unexciting middle class who were mostly public servants. To be a public servant in the 1970s was not difficult because there were far more government departments then. This was the time when people stuck to a single job for their entire life time, no matter how bad it was, or how bad they were at it. People aspired to be a part of the PSIS (the Public Service Investment Society) as this would entitle them to loans and a 12.5% discount at the retail stores. The official working hour was of 7 hours and 35 minutes and had one full hour of lunch break. The Friday night brought some excitement as there would be no official work in the weekend. The weekend too was not spent in luxury and included work in and around home. As such there was not much happening in the lives of an average middle class man. The play captures the sentiment of the middle class life of the seventies much before the face of public service changed. In his essay titled “Hallmarked: Roger Hall’s Three Comedies”, Ian Fraser remarks, “Hall is engaged not in subverting but in asserting the values of the middle class…Life in the Glide Time office is conditioned by bureaucratic inertia and arbitrary regulation, but in the face of this daily absurdity Hall seems to suggest that a redeeming comradeship and compassion are possible.” 

Glide Time is a play on the lives of the members of the stores section of a large government department. It points out the sterility and wastefulness of such a life which has contributed nothing and has no meaning. Such life was nothing but a long wait for retirement, a preparation for a retired life which will not last long and then the impending and inevitable death. To pass time the workers indulged in some boring inter- or extra-office affairs, small diversions like passion for rugby but a constant thread of monotony and dullness runs throughout the play. The lives of almost all the characters are blighted. Hannis writes, “The very title of the play suggests a kind of government lethargy… There seem to be large government bureaucracies with employers who kept time of their working hours arranging it the way it suited them the most and not their clients.” (Hannis, 32) The play is set in a government office with four employees John, Jim, Hugh and Beryl and one boss. There is another staff member in the office named Max but he is absent as he has broken his leg, but his desk appears on the stage. The play has ample examples of sloth and inefficiency in the public service departments as the members are quite mindful of their break times, never answer phone calls during lunch hours, Beryl speaks to her mother using office phone several times during duty hours but never during lunch break, Max’s share of work keeps pending and no one takes responsibility of the piling overdue works. The drab existence of the middle class life is emphasized by the appearance of the characters who can barely manage good clothes for themselves. The only character who seems to have some amount of energy is John who is described as a man who “works hard and efficiently at his job, though pretends not to.” (Hannis 32) In the play Hall develops remarkable off-stage characters who play a major part in determining the on-stage action. The play introduces wives, mothers and children who inhabit the world outside the Glide Time office, yet they loom over the life of the play.

The employees in the house try hard to reduce the cost but get frustrated with their own inefficiency. They are so reluctant to work that they do not bother to read the office circular and end up placing wrong order. In an effort to buy cheaper calculators, the employees order them from Japan but at the end of the play it transpires that they could have bought the calculators more cheaply at a local store. They have no desire to improve their performance at work place. Hall’s presentation of this dull repetitive is suggestive of the fact that nothing will ever change in this slothful world. Hall’s presentation of the Government department does reflect reality and since he does not provide a name to the department, the play stands for all the government departments of the then New Zealand.

6.   Glide Time: Reception and Responses

The play was staged by Circa Theatre and was an immediate hit. Even before the prominent dailies like The Evening Post and The Dominion could review it, the theatre hall was full and enthusiasts could hardly find a seat. Ross Jolly, an actor who played the character of John, remembered, “the deafening applause” that greeted the end of the first night. At one point the show had a waiting list for tickets more than 1000 names long.

The play was a big hit because the viewers could easily relate to the characters and plot. Hall, who was himself a part of the public service, had realistically depicted the lives of the public servants in a sympathetic way. The audience never lost affection for the characters. They all knew the life that they saw, were themselves a part of it. The play made Circa Theatre a big name and the actors suddenly became national celebrities.           

The reviews about the play included the admiration for a mixture of comedy and pathos in the play. One of the academic commentators said the play’s observations ‘encapsulate an era’ and that the character’s personal troubles indicate that the public service inertia presented in the play ‘serves as an objective correlative for private despair’. Another said Hall generates laughter using ‘a consistently professional degree of poignancy’. (Hannis,34) According to Richard Prebble, a minister, Glide Time ‘was a successful satire for a reason—because the civil service was to some extent like that. Not all, by all means, but enough to make the play ring true for a great many New Zealanders.’

It is through Glide Time that Roger Hall establishes his cultural identity of a Pakeha playwright in New Zealand He captures the sensibilities and experiences of individuals that are quintessentially local. The theme of the play, the characters are very much a part of Wellington with whom every Pakeha in New Zealand in public service can relate. His ability to portray realistically the essence of local Wellington life highlights the fact that he has himself shed his English identity and have emerged as a Pakeha himself, naturalized by his everyday lived experience in New Zealand. The localization of the theme proves the Pakeha sense of belonging to the country of New Zealand and the playwright’s relationship to what he now considers to be his homeland. His play reflected the experience that every Pakeha in New Zealand had to go through. His success is claiming a space in the Aotearoa literary culture is proven by the fact that an over excited audience had asked Hall in which Government department was he and refused to accept when Hall said that he was in none.  But it was then that Hall knew he had been successful in his attempt of being an intrinsic part of the culture.

Summary 

Therefore in this module we have learnt the basic characteristics of Pakeha plays basing them on the experience of being a Pakeha and the identity crisis that they suffer from for being outsiders. Since a fair skinned New Zealander becomes a Pakeha as a result of the lived experience in New Zealand, one of the major characteristics of the Pakeha plays is the way a Pakeha deals with the otherness and try to be a part of Aotearoa by laying a claim on the landscape which provide them an ownership over the space which they inhabit. Thus most of the Pakeha plays try to situate them within a socio-political and economical space which is quintessentially of New Zealand. It is in this way that they try to derive a cultural identity which they have carved not on the basis of a common ethnic origin but by being inhabitants of a particular place. The module then focussed on Roger Hall, one of the most prominent playwrights of New Zealand whose plays had such mass appeal that hardly any of his plays went un-staged and most of them were houseful hits. The module will provided an introduction to his early life and career, his major works and the awards and recognitions he has received. The following section of the module focussed on the play Glilde Time which is Roger Hall’s first theatrical break through and an all time hit. The module discussed the middle class mundane life, the monotony and angst and exacerbations with a blend  of humour and pathos. The module briefly talked about the period of 1970s which gets reflected in the play, the major comments that the play received and its impact. The module concluded with an understanding of Roger Hall as a Pakeha playwright whose work inhabits a space that is typically New Zealand and therefore rightfully becomes a part of it, justly naturalizing the playwright’s  position as  a  true New Zealander.

Reference

• Fensome, Alex. “Glide Time a smash hit and sell out Show”. The Dominion Post. https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/64804371/glide-time-a-smash-hit-and-sell-out- show
• Fraser, Ian. “Hallmarked—Roger Hall’s Three Comedies.” Roger Hall. State of the Play. Wellington: Price Milburn for Victoria University Press, 1979.
• Fraser,         Ian.         “Before         the         Office,         there         was         Glide         Time”. https://publicaddress.net/speaker/before-the-office-there-was-glide-time/
• Hannis, Grant. “Roger Hall and Rogernomics: The Fictional Chronicling of New Zealand’s Economic Revolution.”British Review of New Zealand Studies. 15:6 (2005) 29-58.
• Ranford,            Jodie.            “’Pakeha’,            Its            Origin            and            Meaning”. https://maorinews.com/writings/papers/other/pakeha.htm
• Robinson Roger and Nelson Wattie. The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writer/hall-roger
• Smith, Adriann Anne Herron. Seeing Ourselves on Stage: Revealing Ideas about Pakeha Cultural Identity Through Theatrical Performances. University of Otago, 2010.
• Wong, Gilbert. “Playwright Roger Hall—the Quiet Guy on the Fringes.”. NZ Herald. 15 July, 2001. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=200211