Play By Baxter Is Welcomed

Regardless of the box office, it has been the policy of Rosalie and Patric Carey to present quality plays at the Globe Theatre, thereby establishing a background against which the creative artist can feel at home.

But until now they have been disappointed over how little this opportunity has been recognised by local writers.

Before the Globe Theatre was built Patric Carey produced a locally page 358 written script for Corso and a short sketch of Alex Guyan’s made its debut at the Globe but, otherwise, New Zealand plays have not been included in the repertoire.

In recent months the Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, James K. Baxter, has been a frequent visitor to the theatre, and in this time has written no fewer than five plays, three of which will be presented at the Globe.

The first, The Band Rotunda, marks the 100thCarey production, independent of other societies, in Dunedin. It opens on Saturday.

In the cast are Betty Ussher, Hal Smith, Greg Cameron, Frank Grayson, Roy Fogo, Tom Clements and Jonathan Brown.

Some comments by the author are printed below

The Author Says . . .

It would be a grave mistake if I were to offer anyone an ‘explanation’ of The Band Rotunda, since a play, however imperfect, is a work of art and hence not susceptible to rational explanation.

But I can still make some comments about the way I regard the play. On a religious and archetypal level it is a recapitulation in theatre of the Passion of Christ.

To understand something of the way the play moves on this level, it would be a help for anyone interested to meditate on the peculiar words of St Paul that Christ was ‘made sin’ for us, or equally to read slowly ten times over the Twenty-Second Psalm, sometimes called the Crucifix of the Old Testament, which Christ apparently recited while He was dying.

On a realistic level the play is about four drunks and a boy who meet outside a bandstand on the morning and evening of Good Friday. They speak and act as people might in such circumstances. Until the very end of the play none of them enters the band rotunda itself. The rotunda might be said to represent a state of religious harmony; and thus the play is about our universal human exile from that harmony.

Each person in the play (one of the drunks is a woman) reacts to this state of exile in a different way. They are positively interrupted by members of the Salvation Army and negatively by the police.

The fact that the play is about drunks is really more or less incidental; though, having been for a long time a drunk myself, I probably have quite a good grip on their language and habits. The play may even be at another level a satire on the unsuccessful efforts to impose social order on personal chaos so characteristic of New Zealand society and the Western world in general.

In exploring the religious consciousness or unconsciousness of my fellow citizens I trust I have been reasonably accurate; but I have not the faintest wish to take over the teaching authority that belongs to the clergy and indicate the paths that other people could follow.

page 359

A play is a play; and I am a playwright, not a lay propagandist. Thus my only final aim can be to present a dramatic statement of the human condition itself.

1967 (441)