Drama among the Faceless

(an interview with Arthur Baysting)

How did you come to start writing plays?

I was on the Fellowship for two years. A bit of an old man’s home, with due respect to the institution. I’m glad it exists but you get a certain feeling of undue security. Anyway, the first year I was down there I wrote the talks published under the title The Man on the Horse – fairly subjective stuff – and I had enough time to put a bit of polish on them. I kept well away from the Globe Theatre the first year, but the second I went along and Patric Carey asked me to act in a play. I found Patric very helpful and a man with a most fertile mind. This enabled me to write a large number of plays. I haven’t counted them but there would be six or seven probably.

It’s not something I would normally do. I’ve never felt I was a playwright any more than I thought I was a poet. I happened to stumble into the field and start doing it, but not as if it was second nature.

Do you get more satisfaction from writing plays?

Yes. It’s the most communal of all arts, both in content and in the fact that you involve actors and a whole group of people. It’s very cheering to see plays put on here – I don’t mean the big sort of Christmas cake effort – more the local one. A good local group is worth its weight in gold; it breaks this terrible bloody social constipation that we have here. Everyone is on his own roost and doesn’t know his neighbour. The chief form of blood sport here is family page 20 feuding. You can write plays about this, of course – it’s admirable material – but it’s a terrible social situation. If you can break through that, then you’ve got something, and for some reason the theatre does this.

You have almost the beginning of a community. God knows the modern world hasn’t got any communities in the real sense. You just have families and a large faceless society. But a good theatre gives you some sort of community, even if only the ghost of one. It’s a beautiful thing.

Your plays were written specifically for the Globe?

I was writing for Carey up to a point. I don’t mean that no other producer could put my plays on, but I knew he could. And if one can, others can.

What about the Globe Theatre? Technically do you think it’s ideal?

Yes, it’s just about ideal. I don’t mean that plays can’t be put on a large stage, but because the Globe is small it only uses the local group. With a bigger theatre you have to have tons of money, grants and so on. You’ve got your eye on the box office all the time. It’s the dollar note you’re after, not theatre. I think in this country professional theatre is the dog’s breakfast.

How about the large-scale fully-professional theatre?

At that point you get your wedding cake situation – you know, the big job, the New Zealand job. This is, in the arts, almost political. It’s the national notion. And it’s a hopeless notion in this country. Any salt this country’s got is regional. Westland is different from Otago, Otago’s different from Wellington, and so on. These regional qualities keep the country alive. They should emerge in the theatre.

You were talking about New Zealand society, the ‘ faceless society’. Do you find your themes tend to revolve around this sort of thing? – loss of contact between people and suchlike? This seems to be the case with a lot of modern British drama.

True enough. This might sound a silly thing to say but I think we might have the edge on them – I don’t mean artistically but socially. This is a new country, at least for the pakehas. And you have this sense of endless unbroken ground. Plays which centre on the fact that people can’t communicate are useful. I like to see plays about them breaking through this, even if on a primitive level. This communication thing is what tragedy is all about. It’s not the fact that Othello strangles Desdemona and if he hadn’t they would have got on bloody well together. These things happen but they’re more like a failure in the plumbing of human life. That’s not so much the tragedy. The page 21 tragedy is that there’s such an abundance of chaos in human affairs. People are always emotionally stupid. They turn life into a situation of permanent animosities.

Of course drama can never be truly realistic. In art it’s the crisis you take because it shows what the grain of ordinary reality is like. If you cut a tree through you see the rings in it. The tree isn’t in a natural state when it’s cut through but it does tell you when the winters have been warm or cold.

Do you ever feel that the people you most want to get through to are those who never see your plays or read your poetry?

I have said somewhere that if I changed the emotional climate of the country one per cent during my lifetime I would feel I had done a good job. The verse is like liqueur. It spreads very slowly. The novel, or even the play, is more like beer or wine. It has a quicker effect. There’s more to it and people are affected more by it.

What do you think of audience reaction to your plays?

I’d put it this way. Whenever an audience watches a play – this would be particularly for my plays – they project their own emotional pattern on it. They find in it certain meaningful areas according to their own conditioning and background. You can’t put on a play with much meat in it without the audience finding in it meaningful patches and blank patches. This is their (it’s a horrible word) – their education. They catch up with the playwright. Of course on some points they may be ahead of him but it’s the points where he is ahead that are of interest. In the kind of country we have, you’re dealing with hideously uneducated people – I mean on the emotional level. A sort of frustrated expatriate Englishman who doesn’t know who he is and whose fantasies are chiefly of rugby football or violence.

Do you ever write specifically to entertain?

I couldn’t be bothered just to write for entertainment because that means you are giving them back the frame of reality they already have with a little twist at the end just to cheer them up. I don’t want to cheer them up. I want to make them less despairing. That, in a sense, would be the moral issue; when you make sense of life you despair less. It doesn’t mean you have a message, it just means you’re trying to make sense of an area. Obviously then, some of it will be erotic. Then the somewhat dull Sunday School teacher in the back of their mind will object to this – ‘This won’t do!’ But what he really means is that no art will do. He doesn’t want art, he wants Bible readings. I’m not against Bible readings but I think you want art as well. But again and again page 22 it’s the emotional problem you come up against, not the intellectual one.

There are very few others writing plays in New Zealand. Do you ever feel the need to look around and compare your plays, and find there’s little there?

It seemed a bit like that at first. I did feel the place had been a bit haunted by two things. The first was literary. I remember the first play I saw was Curnow’s The Axe, a most impressive play, but definitely on a literary model. Any man who’s a writer, and then turns to plays, whether he’s a novelist, poet, or whatever, is thinking to some extent in literary terms. I know I was faced with this and I had to get around it. I hope I have. But it’s a problem.

The other thing is journalism. You can produce a documentary – a New Zealand slice of life – but the slice will be a very thin one. The surface of reality which people accept is very narrow and you have to get more into it than that.

There is also the problem with speech. You can deadpan a bit of good Kiwi dialogue. You can have that in a play all right but you also have to have language. A play depends on language and the action is meaningless without it. Without the language you are often left with just melodrama and that’s not what people come to see.

What about when you are writing for radio?

On the radio the thing that strikes me is that you’re listening to that box and the voice comes out – it’s a bit soporific. You need something that will shatter this coma where one word sounds just like another. On the stage you can do this with action. It’s more difficult on radio, there’s a bit of a trance about it.

Radio is good for an intellectual argument. With the stage the audience wants more than that but on radio it doesn’t matter so much.

Can you say a little about Who Killed Sebastian?

It’s about a young chap who killed himself or something like that, I forget how he died. He’s had this break-up that occurs to quite a number in their late teens who have been socially highly-conditioned up to that point. He’s on drugs or something and he’s wandering round and he takes up with this girl. Her relationship to him is somewhat maternal. She’s trying to nurse him back to functioning order. Part of it is a conversation later on between the girl and the mother. The mother realises to some extent that they haven’t made too good a job of bringing up their white-haired boy. The father has retired from life pretty much to the whisky bottle. Quite a normal sort of business household.

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