My two favourite regional teams the Hurricanes and the Chiefs in the semi-final of Super Rugby at Sky Stadium in Wellington mid-June would usually be first choice experience. Not this time. We got off the train among the hundreds if not thousands of mostly yellow and black be-scarved Hurricanes supporters, but we went south, up town to Circa Theatre for the last performance of Roger Hall’s play ‘End of Summer Time’. This is the third outing for his grumpy All Blacks fan Dickie Hart. With present and future All Blacks competing at Sky Stadium, Hart would no doubt have thought us mad to prefer a blimmin’ play with one old geezer grouching around a room for several hours. Not a prob.
As we sat down in the third row, we agreed that this was the demographic we expected, arty grey power, not yet consigned to the rest homes up the line. The set was cosy stuffed seats and bland landscapes on the walls. Gavin Rutherford, bulging out of his cosy jersey as Dickie Hart, shuffled on and took a seat. He urged Anita and Janet not to be shy about being late and please take seats in the empty front row. He kidded them a bit and then began talking about the body corporate, the bossy albeit desirable body of Stephanie.
The first half we became reacquainted with Dickie and Glenda and the way she in her husband’s view tricked him over the trip to see the All Blacks in Japan. It seemed over in a trice.
The second half started with more kidding of Janet and Anita and the old guy who offered Dickie his walking stick, and then Dickie tracked the impact of Covid on everybody.
Wam! Glenda died of Covid. Dickie is bewildered, husbands are supposed to die first. The play jolts us out of cosy chuckling and leads to loud guffaws, especially when we learn one of the body corporate wants to know if Glenda’s free coffee coupons are available. The full-on professor Fergus returns to rescue Dickie from sloppy domestic inertia. Dickie is back in the land of the living but reminds us that Shakespeare said we shuffle off this mortal coil.
Bravo, bravissimo! Gavin is reminiscent of Grant Tilly’s earlier iteration of Dickie, but without the theatrical tenseness, more avuncular. Looking at the Roger Hall Wall next to the entrance to Circa Two, I was struck by how theatrically positioned the actors are in previous Hall plays. Gavin is more relaxed, maybe a generational theatre thing, maybe just Gavin’s easygoing schtick.
The Wall reminds us of Roger’s extraordinarily long run of box office hits and suggests a retrospective is surely on the cards. Will this include the end of Dickie with ‘End of Summer Time’? Its setting on Takapuna Beach would be a fitting end to what began there so long ago when our other great playwright Bruce Mason wrote and performed the 40 parts of ‘The End of the Golden Weather’, where his character Firpo ran so desperately along that beach.
It is a fair bet that this is not the end game for the two endless summer evocations. Bruce Mason is settled in that permanent rest home with a classic play and film, and certain revivals, while Roger crafts a new play about a group of women who buy art.
For now, as we got the train back among the drooping yellow and black Hurricane scarves, we chatted about how Roger has mined the sad and the surviving of the Covid impact, blending shrewd observations of our foibles with poignant tragedy and pointed references to rest-home rip-offs, peppered and salted and sweetened with laughter, the laughter that eases the complications of the human condition. And Dickie has not yet turned his toes up. Could he bow out with a cruise? A Bucket List adventure? Bossed by a new flame? Or back on the farm he came from? End or not for Dickie, the play can sit successfully alongside the rest of the Roger Hall Super Wall. Watch the Circa space.