New Zealand Travelogue, Part Four: Amazed and Inspired by Theatre in Wellington
My first train journey was aboard the Coastal Pacific, a scenic route from Christchurch mid-way up the eastern coast of the South Island to Picton at the northern tip. Taking about six hours, I enjoyed the coastal views as well as passing along farms in the countryside. To some people, countryside is novel but after spending time in rural Scotland and Hawai’i, the built environment is more unusual to me than the non-built — nevertheless, I enjoyed it!
Upon arrival in Picton, it was a short walk over to the ferry terminal where myself and most of the other train passengers continued our journeys, boarding the Interislander service to cross the Cook Strait to Wellington, New Zealand’s capitol city located on the southern tip of the North Island. All told, we were three and a half hour at sea, the first portion of which was incredibly scenic, navigating our way through the fjords and wee islands that inclose Picton.
I was relieved to arrive in Wellington, being rather exhausted from so much time in motion. But the behemoth city felt overwhelming. Whereas Christchurch had been rebuilt into a hip and modern city, Wellington reminded me more of what was to be expected in a city — big businesses in big, boring buildings. While it would have been easy to make a rash generalization and dismiss the place entirely, I reminded myself that if I were to arrive in Downtown Seattle as a stranger, I could just as easily make the same judgement, unaware of the rich cultural scene lying in every direction from the hollow city centre. So I went online to see if I could find any cultural happenings for my lone evening in the city. To my surprise, there was quite a bit happening, including several concerts and theatre performances. Even more surprising, one of the plays was a contemporary response to Janet Frame’s novel Owls Do Cry, going by the same name. Having just been turned on to the famous New Zealand writer while in Dunedin, it was quite a serendipitous discovery!
Being too late to buy a ticket online, I walked along the waterfront to the Circa Theatre in hopes of buying a ticket on site. The building was medium-sized and lacked the pretension of some larger theatres. It reminded me of the Royal Court Theatre in London, a place I had grown to love for its intimate performance spaces and focus on developing new work with emerging writers. The lobby was bustling with a growing crowd of patrons and the person at the ticket counter was rather stunned when I asked to buy a new ticket rather than collect one that was already booked. She pulled up a seating chart on her computer revealing that the show was nearly sold out, but a few seats, indicated by white dots were still available. I saw four or five seats open in the far corners of the back row, but then I spotted one wee white dot three rows back in the centre, I went for that one!
I can’t easily put to words how wonderful the performance was. It has been a while since I saw any theatre and Owls Do Cry was one of the best shows I’ve seen in my life. With just six actors in a black box with microphones dangling from the ceiling, a few chairs and equipment crates, the actors had more than they needed to ignite the imagination and create a thrilling dreamscape inspired by Frame’s novel. There was of course stage lighting, all white, as well as projectors for casting white text onto the walls, floor and ceiling. It was the performers entirely that brought life to the story and they did so in a stunning way that included the audience without being cheesy. They broke the third wall, broke character and broke open my creative heart. Following the performance, my mind was racing with ideas for different writing projects I might engage in, most of which I have already forgotten. I didn’t realize (or forgot) how nourishing taking in other creative work can be for my own creative practice. No wonder I found it so difficult to write much of anything while in Kona.
With my upcoming time as a visiting wrtier at the Michael King Writers Centre on my mind and unsure what I would work on while there, I left the performance with a solid answer: An essay putting to words the ideas I have had about community publishing and never fully articulated. This is an idea close to my heart that has come out with projects like the writing anthologies and bookshop I helped create in Dumfries — but I don’t think most people really understand why I took on those projects and the vision of what I am working towards. So this thing that has been inside me for quite some time needs to get out in a thorough and thoughtful way — now is my chance to do it. Perhaps less ambitious than finishing the edits of my latest manuscript or writing a new short story, which were other projects I had considered using my time for, this was the right time and place to bring my ideas on writing community from my mind to the page.
It was great to walk back to my hotel after the show feeling such a sense of awe from what I had just seen as well as a restful reassurance that I now knew what I had come to New Zealand to do. That’s always the way for me, I’ve come to expect it now: Show up for one reason or another knowing the deeper reason will only reveal itself after my arrival.