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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Notes Accompanying the Text of The Band Rotunda

Notes Accompanying the Text of The Band Rotunda

1In this play the main characters are drunks. It would be a mistake for a producer or actors to identify them as merely comic types or grotesques, though there are grotesque and comic elements in the action and dialogue. Their illusions – nostalgic, acquisitive, romantic, political, religious – are the common illusions that make up the mental life of others. Their range of communication, though limited, is genuine; their forms of language, though violent, are intended to express a bleak, truncated poetry. Their central problem is, as for us, the incommunicable weight of life itself.page 527
2It 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 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.

1968 (498)