 In my PhD research, I've been chasing ghosts. Now let's be clear, I'm a theatre scholar, not a ghost buster, but theatre is an ephemeral form. Each night plays are recreated live to win over the hearts and minds of a new group of people watching them in the theatre. They exist and then they're gone. I've been hunting New Zealand plays that have been performed internationally. I've been trying to make sense of the traces they've left behind to understand the significance of the journeys they've made. I've been burrowing through the archives, looking at reviews, images, scripts, chasing ghosts. But tonight, for one night only, these plays are coming back to life. With the help of these actors, we're going to examine how plays have represented our taroa to the world and how they've been received by the world in turn. This is finding ourselves. New Zealand theatres overseas experience live. Now, throughout this country's dramatic history, there's been a strong pull for New Zealand plays to be toured and produced internationally. With a relatively small population, there's an economic as well as artistic appeal to be seen by a potentially much larger audience in overseas destinations. Now, New Zealand's dramatic development has been defined by an identity crisis and this is especially true when New Zealand plays are produced overseas. Now, you might be asking at this point, what is New Zealand's most successful play internationally? Well, I have one possible answer for you and it might surprise you. The Rocky Horror Show. So, there's the statue of Rocky creator Richard O'Brien in Hamilton. This is where he spent his formative teenage years. Amongst the fishnet stocking and heels, can we capture O'Brien's coming of age hidden within the show? Brad and Janet can be seen as analogs of small-town New Zealanders who venture overseas where they can give themselves over to absolute pleasure and experience sensual dangers to treasure forever. Now, Rocky's New Zealand consciousness exists under the surface as an alternative narrative in reading. The thing itself can be said to be in a kind of cultural drag. OK, I've got another option for you. Ladies Night by Steven Sinclair and Kevin McCartney. Now, in this one, four kemi blows decide to form a strip act. It's being performed all over the world, but it's localised in each place it plays in, so kemi beef cake becomes joint-land muscle plots and so on in an endless line of a country-specific strippers. Ladies Night wears its cultural drag so convincingly that audiences would have no idea of its country of origin. Ben, stop pleading with the judges. OK, cut that. Here's another option, Skin Tight by Gary Henderson. It's the most produced New Zealand play where the New Zealand setting has been retained. So this is set amongst the South Canterbury plains. And in this play, rural battlers Tom and Elizabeth reflect on a life spent together and engage in these visceral physical fights as they negotiate their differing narratives. Oh! Did you know I had a lover? I thought not. No, come on. Tell me a flesh wound. Tom. Who was it? A sheerah. A sheerah? Well, what kind of sheerah? A sheep sheerah. How many kinds of sheerah are there? So Skin Tight has a number of cues and clues that the knowing local audience can identify and identify with. But then, national identity itself is a performance, a set of assumptions that become naturalised by a very active repetition. This is the feedback loop. The self-referential markers of identity that the ideal local knowing audience is meant to recognise as their own. Sheep sheerahs. It includes and it excludes and it resonates differently when placed outside of this country. Skin Tight does not change, but its audiences do. New Zealand and the world do see different things. Now let's travel back further into New Zealand's dramatic past. Before the 1970s, there were a few plays that actually represented New Zealand. Theatres privileged mostly British scripts and audiences dreamed of the Motherland. New Zealand drama was ready to be invented. A new group of New Zealand playwrights sent their scripts overseas. Now, one of these was Stella Jones, whose 1957 play The Tree, thank you, was first produced in Bristol, England. It was only once it gained this international legitimacy that it was actually performed in New Zealand. So in the tree, a young woman, Hilda, is eager to leave in New Zealand, which she sees as... It's a tame, safe, little world. I'm going away. I won't stay any longer. But where? It doesn't matter. I don't know and I don't care. I'm going. No one can stop me. So an important aspect of New Zealand identity developed in the tree there is this pool felt by New Zealanders towards international travel and opportunities. So Jones was part of a nationalist movement of playwrights, most prominently Bruce Mason. Now, he toured his play The End of the Golden Weather to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1963, the same year that regular jet services between New Zealand and Britain began, which contributed to the concept of the New Zealanders' OE, where you go overseas to find yourself. Mason identified... A pricking sense of inferiority when we place ourselves beside the best that was thought, said, painted, and built in Europe. The argument that nothing we may have to say can make any possible impact on the world at large because we are so... insignificant. Now, Mason's End of the Golden Weather was the counterargument to this view. However, he was still driven by this need for cultural validation, for the old culture to prove it the new. There's a sense in order that you have an identity at first has to be recognised by others and possess this one. Now, this proves a problem when in order for the New Zealand play to be produced overseas, it's localised by the international company and the belief that this will make it more relevant to its audiences and therefore do better at the box office. Let's travel next to 1979. Now, this was when a New Zealand play opened in London's West End and stayed there for 18 months. This was middle-aged spread by prolific New Zealand playwright Roger Hall. New Zealand, this was greeted as a breakthrough work. It concerns itself with infidelity in the Wellington suburbs and a fair taking place between a deputy school principal and a relief teacher. However, in London's West End, the New Zealand play was produced and performed, adapted in cultural British drag. Let's look first at the New Zealand version. Judy and Colin, who are having the affair, discussed their desire for travel. We're going to go overseas. I've decided and I'm saving up after going, just as soon as I've got enough. Well, note there the similarity between Hilda's line with the tree and that one with Judy. Well, I keep going, you guys are doing really well. You're open asian. You're going to do what Karoza did in the book, go around everywhere by train? I've never been. Well, anywhere. By the time I've taken four years to get my degree and done some teaching, doing some money, I was married when Jane was born. God. Is that the time? Compare this with how travel is situated in the British edition? Oh, God. We're not off on our travel rem in Mrs Owe. Nine days here one year. I thought about there the next. Grab two more on another Spanish steps and getting on to undy stolen and group getting grounds. I'm Judy. Are you another who's done the grab tour on the instalment plan? It's where I met Robert, actually. So, for the New Zealanders, travel here is a big deal. New Zealand Judy has never left the country which speaks to her great desire to get out. In Britain, it's just across the channel. The stakes are lower. So, middle-aged spread is a commercial cultural adaptation with a colonial premise. The British centre is privileged over a commercially and culturally inferior New Zealand. Let's go now to 2015. And a player was actually able to experience live. Generation of Z. Now, this is a immersive zombie show and I experienced this four times during its run in London. I think we've just got one of the characters there from the play coming out here. Now, this is a product of globalisation and it rejected New Zealand locality in an attempt to enter an international paradise where an endless horde of zombie fans can get this guy under control. In its own way, it repeats the cultural adaptation of ladies night and middle-aged spread. It shows theatre makers with a global outlook no longer needing to make New Zealand plays in order to have their culture affirmed. But, New Zealand Aotearoa with its increasingly diverse identities does have important stories and histories to tell. I have found that audiences find ways to relate regardless and actively search for markers of cultural equivalence. Settings don't need to be changed. They need to have a skin tight. So, after chasing New Zealand theatre's ghosts and being chased by New Zealand theatre zombies I've come to my conclusion. There is value in promoting works with markers of New Zealand, Aotearoa lest the globalised zombies completely take over. Tonight we've travelled with several New Zealand works, some that look very different on overseas stages. Some markers travel some remain at home. These are the stories of New Zealand and New Zealand's OE and identity crisis and the struggles of making it internationally. And so we close the plays for now until they live again. Thanks for letting us play. Thank you very much for that. Questions? Thank you for that super entertaining presentation. I was just wondering about your methodology and the kind of critical framework that you've used to contextualise this study. Yes, so a lot of my research has involved going into the archives and looking at what's actually been kept. Luckily New Zealand's history has actually been pretty well documented. So I was able to go to the Hocken in Otago and there's the folders for Roger Hall and playwrights like Robert Lord. So I'm taking that because as I said there's only these traces that are left behind. I kind of have to interpret through it what the live experience was for the audiences and the different destinations watching these plays. So reviews are an important record and it provides some of the possible responses that the productions open up. I do look at some different theories so we are interested in post-colonial theory, we're interested in global hybridity or these sorts of things. So that's how I'm able to pull it together and hopefully evoke what the actual experience of these plays were like at the time. Thank you again, it was really enjoyable. Did you find anything further back beyond 1950? Did you find any evidence of say even early New Zealand, Victorian sort of talking back to the, you know, how do we answering back to the Empire? Yes, so there's a few cases on way, way back. So there's one in the late 1800s which toured to Australia and one of its big set pieces was the pink and white terraces eruption so they had this huge spectacle about that. But then after that early 1900s there was this play called The Wind and the Rain and that actually played in the West End for three years and it was also produced in America and was wildly popular so that was by a again a New Zealand playwright who lived in the country, was brought up here and then he went to Britain to seek his fortune and so he wrote a play about postdoctoral students in Edinburgh which was, you could kind of say was influenced by his own time in Dunedin which obviously has some interesting intersections with Scottish history there so there's these kind of bizarre cases which is like can we really claim this in New Zealand's history so when that kind of has been spoken in the canon they say it's the New Zealand play that got away it's the New Zealand play by proxy but again there's this kind of is a psychic link that if you want to read it in there you can. Who's that playwright put you on the spot? Hodge Thank you very much Very enjoyable I hope he's alright You mentioned a quite an important point is we need to talk about box office and a lot of the all this comes back down to money as I say you want to make it as markable as possible and it does put a bit of pressure on the people doing the preparing these performances and sending them overseas what do you feel in a way having looked at the research do you feel that there is among the contemporaries a kind of pressure that they do conform or are they pushing back against it do you see it more wanting to push that New Zealand experience more because we don't want to like this is brown boys because that's completely British but it does work here I know the links so I feel that experience can work but what's your opinion with that Creative New Zealand who do a lot of the funding for theatre they have a policy which is actively interested in showcasing New Zealand works overseas so they have been doing a lot of work in that area in terms of touring it but this is the sanctioned view of what New Zealand identity is so the shows that they choose to promote overseas so there's ones that go through there and then there's kind of the independence so there is a movement of theatre makers who aren't interested in these national issues anymore they do want to make these global stories so you've got the government push on one hand versus other theatre makers who are rejecting this so a few years ago they supported the New Zealand at Edinburgh season so this was a big push to the Edinburgh fringe to get New Zealand work out and this did kind of reflect a New Zealand Pacifica identity overseas but that isn't actually reflected in the range of works that we see in the mainstream theatres inside the country so that's also a problem as well in terms of there's kind of one thing for overseas and then another thing that's not happening enough within New Zealand We should probably think of that time but do you think that there is I'm thinking about the fringe having a relative experience with the fringe do you think it is more acceptable now to be overtly New Zealand and I was there the first flight of the Concord's performance of the fringe then in some ways then it is to be overtly New Zealand in New Zealand like we've now created an identity so we can actually really sell ourselves and get those plays as seen as somehow cliched or a bit pasai here are you seeing that transition in New Zealand identity? Well sometimes it's the opposite reaction so one of the interesting cases for the Enbra fringe with that New Zealand season was one of the big shows that they push was The Factory which was considered the first Pacifica musical and so in New Zealand this was a huge deal in terms of identity and in terms of genre but then when it was presented overseas it didn't do very well at all so it was presenting a new take on the story they kind of saw it as like an old fashioned musical so there are still these kinds of problems of translation in terms of what we see as something that's really new and exciting and then it goes over and it doesn't get the same sort of response Thank you very much James for that Brilliant