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Drama

Heroes and Butterflies

by Robert Lord directed by Tony Taylor Downstage Theatre

Who is Robert Lord? Well, between 1970 and 1974 he wrote several plays with some surface polish but very little underneath. An apprenticeship with the promise of better things to come perhaps. However, for the last four years Lord has lived in New York and if he's written anything new there it's yet to be seen here. Now for some reason Downstage has decided to resurrect the last play he wrote in New Zealand, which was premiered in Auckland four years ago.

Heroes and Butterflys claims to have something interesting to say about politics; it is advertised as, "a funny, exciting insight into the soft and sensuous cocoon of politics". The play operates with a pseudo-Reichiari correlation between sexuality and politics. It is the aim of Cynthia Gordon to elevate her husband (the minister of war) to the position of Prime Minister and thereby re-store his lost potency. She sets out to do this by undermining the morale of the current Prime Minister and by engineering a victory for her husband in the civil war which rages outside.

The first two acts are given over to the unfolding of this process. They take place in an unspecified country which has probably developed from a diet of 30's movies, Noel Coward's plays and sub-Evelyn Waugh novels. At no point did I feel any significant parallels to New Zealand society in any period of its history because its feet are planted firmly in fantasyland. The characters who occupy this land are all members of its ruling class or attached to this class.

Almost all of them are extreme caricatures. The women consist of: the war minister's pushy "ball-busting" wife, her friend the single-minded lesbian, the Prime Minister's neurotic daughter and his nubile granddaughter. The war minister is impotent, the Prime Minister has a mild taste for incest. And hovering round the edges of this decadent cast are a philosophical gardener, a witty butler and two American diplomats.

Now, this ruling class is under attack from a group of unspecified "rebels" whose only visible act is the capture of the Prime Minister's daughter, to no particular end. At no point do we learn anything of the society whose ruling class is shown declining into impotence. Instead we get some tedious variations on the "private vices, public virtues" theme laced together with disposable chatter about butterflies, flowers, weeds and gardens.

However the butterfly, motif had about as much symbolic power for me as the kind you see on the walls of houses and as for the heroes, well, you see them in public places set in cast iron. No doubt some Levi-Straussian could come forward with a convincing explanation of these motifs. But this would not alter the basic failure of the play to make a meaningful political statement.

This failure occurs at a number of different levels. First, the play eschews history in favour of a generalised, abstract commentary on the nature of power and politics. But this is meaningless. There is really no such thing as politics in general but only specific political and historical situations which need to be examined on their own terms before general comparisons can be made. As with Red Mole's "Ghost Rite" we are left with a spectacle which makes no connections with the fabric of New Zealand society.

Secondly the Politicians in the play are reduced to the dimension of caricature: when he attains the Prime Ministership, William Gordon is exposed as a wimpering child playing a nightmarish game he can't understand; Sir Edward Graig, the previous Prime Minister is presented as a half-senile old man, chasing his granddaughter and prattling on about butterflys.

Heroes and Butterflys offers a very naive and adolescent view of the psychology of politicians rather than seeing them as part of an overall political situation. It's as if someone tried to reduce the changing course of the Vietnam war war to the state of Nixon's sexual potency. Thirdly, although it's very hard to construct a whole picture of the social structure it's quite clear that it owes more to literature than anything else. No translation can be made to contemporary New Zealand society or any other for that matter.

I won't say anything about the production of the actors except that both were of an overall high standard. My quarrel is with the play.

Bob Dylan has warned us of the dangers of "too much of nothing". Heroes and Butterflys provides some funny lines, no effective satire, much cynicism and some very dull passages. It is a piece of sophisticated kitsch quite removed from anything going on outside the theatre.

Lawrence MacDonald