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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Another Baxter Globe Premiere

page 660

Another Baxter Globe Premiere

‘To dig into the nuclear structure of marriage among Remuera socialites’ is perhaps the main purpose of Mr O’Dwyer’s Dancing Party, which will be the sixth James K. Baxter play to be given its premiere at the Globe Theatre in Dunedin over the past two years.

The play, which represents a changed technique by actually incorporating miming instead of using it separately, grew out of Mr Baxter’s associations in Dunedin with such people as Patric Carey and John Casserley.

‘Once I would not have had the courage to do it,’ Mr Baxter says. ‘But a number of plays put on the stage with the intelligent, vigorous production of Mr Carey have given me confidence.

‘On the social level, John Ennis and his wife Mildred have reached a marital stalemate. A not too metaphorical bomb is placed under the ailing ménage when Tom O’Dwyer, a teacher of expressionist dance, comes to the district.

‘I have weighted the play on the female side by giving O’Dwyer four other women pupils as well as Mildred.’

Mr Baxter says the situation would perhaps make an interesting comedy, but it would be somewhat less than life – ‘I am not interested in Lilliputians.’

He adds, ‘You will find the original pattern of Mr O’Dwyer’s Dancing Party somewhere in Euripides’s The Bacchae, and that is not strange since the Greeks first explored the deepest contours of the Western mind, and set their findings down in myths.

‘It is a playwright’s job to discover such patterns under the debris of contemporary events, and to find meaning also means to find courage.’

In the cast are Anne Holmes, Shirley Mackenzie, Marilyn Parker, Barbara Casserley, Helen O’Grady, Ian Ralston, Barry Kershaw and Peter Robinson, and the first night will be Thursday, November 14. In the meantime The Cherry Orchard will conclude its season next weekend.

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