Theatre Subsidies

Sir: There appeared recently in your columns an account of the production by the Globe Theatre in Dunedin of three plays written by me in 1967. I have no quarrel whatever with that article, in which Philip Smithells discussed the plays with vigour and discernment; but I wish to bring to your readers’ notice certain subsidiary details.

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I would have written no plays in 1967 (the second year of my tenure of the Robert Burns Fellowship) if it had not been for the stimulus, encouragement, and enormously enlivening example of Patric Carey of the Globe Theatre. I would have written no mimes if John Casserley of the School of Physical Education had not been there to perform them. Why not? Because New Zealand playwrights need theatres and performers at their elbows who will welcome their plays.

The Globe Theatre in Dunedin has struggled on for a decade, kept going by the unlimited dedication of its directors and an occasional royalties grant from the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council. This year a representative of the Arts Council made a verbal promise to the directors of the Globe Theatre that this small grant of $400 would be continued; but in the event the Council was obliged to withhold it because of lack of funds. When John Casserley applied to the Arts Council for any grant they could spare, however small, to help him keep one brilliant dance student in training in New Zealand for another year, the Arts Council were unable to give him a single dollar.

No doubt I am partisan, being a writer, not an administrator or statistician. There may be good reason why $114,000 should go to keep a national ballet company on its legs, $40,000 to recoup the losses on two tours of what would have been (if it had succeeded) a national theatre of sorts, $4000 to a theatre group in Christchurch which has just folded up, and which was paying a weekly salary of $70 to each of its actors – there may be good reason for these massive experimental ventures. But is it not a trifle grandiose, however well-intentioned, for the Arts Council to strip itself financially to support national and professional ventures – professional in the sense that the actors get a weekly salary – and have nothing left for the struggling and experimental theatre groups which are most truly regional and which alone can stimulate and encourage the New Zealand playwright? I suggest that the Arts Council is making a mistake of emphasis.

The minimal royalties grant to the Globe might make the hairsbreadth difference whether that theatre kept going or not. It certainly does not trouble me much that I should receive no financial return for the production of my plays. But (very frankly) I have long been bitterly concerned with the communal and cultural barrenness of the country where I was born, grew up, and where I will be buried. To make New Zealand plays is one way of bringing a moribund community to life. If I had approached the Southern Players, the alternate theatre group in Dunedin – who incidentally have now a regular grant from the Arts Council – I know they would have had politely to decline my plays, for reasons of decorum, and because a professional company holding on by the skin of its teeth cannot afford a single gamble with its audiences. Indeed I did approach them and gracefully accepted the inevitable rebuff. My heart was with the Globe Theatre anyway, because it is living and active and bold and experimental, and because it has struck roots page 476 in the communal life of Dunedin.

I sympathise with the financial difficulties of the Arts Council. I suggest that, to make ends meet and to foster drama in New Zealand, they should begin to think regionally rather than nationally, and not put too much stress on professionalism in theatre.

Two days ago I saw the first play of another New Zealand playwright, Peter Olds, produced with verve and warmth and balance at the Globe; and it did my heart good. I believe that later on John Casserley will be taking it on tour, with no help from the Arts Council. This is grass-roots culture, not established from above, the only kind that really works. I offer my suggestions in a spirit of friendship and compromise, hoping that other New Zealanders, who recognise the value of regional drama, will offer their own comment and support.

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