Leonard Bell - Marti Friedlander

Published as part of the

Gerrard & Marti Friedlander

Creative Lives Series

First published 2020

Auckland University Press

University of Auckland

Private Bag 92019

Auckland 1142

New Zealand

www.press.auckland.ac.nz

text Leonard Bell, 2020

images Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust, 2020

ISBN 9781776710645

Publication is kindly assisted by the Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust and by Creative New Zealand

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior permission of the publisher. The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Design by Keely OShannessy

Image preparation by Spectra Graphics

Front cover: Ralph Hotere, Dunedin, 1978.

Back cover: Gretchen Albrecht in her studio, late 1970s.

Photographs : John Drawbridge, painter, c. 1979; Vincent Ward, filmmaker, 1981; Jenny Bornholdt, poet, c. 2008; Gretchen Albrecht, painter, 1967; Tony Fomison, painter, 1978; Tim and Neil Finn, musicians, 2003.

Photographs : Toss Woollaston, painter, late 1960s; Robert McLeod, painter, c. 1979.

THE ARTISTS

The Current Offence group, from left John McCowan, Philip Thwaites, Alexander Guyan and Michael Noonan, 1965.

A portrait! What could be more simple and more complex; more obvious and more profound.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

L ock Your Doors: Satirists Are Here! is the caption beneath a photograph of four men occupying most of an abruptly cropped picture space. Lodged on a veranda, legs dangling, they stare back intently. Bunched together, slightly askew, one atilt, they dont look quite right, perhaps a few screws loose. Formally dressed, faces a touch pallid, their mouths downturned, their mood appears to veer towards the manic. In a photograph below on the same newspaper page, they sit with their backs to us, facing inwards, unknowable. Who or what are they? Would anyone recognise them in 2020? Perhaps just one, Michael Noonan, who became a legendary scriptwriter for TVNZ.

The four were then well-known performers: Philip Thwaites, Noonan, Moon (John) McCowan and Alexander Guyan (19331991). English-born Guyan, a poet, short-story writer (published in Landfall) and playwright (Conversations with a Golliwog, 1962), went back to Britain in the early 1970s, where his long-worked-on novel, Exciting, Isnt It, was published in 1988. Thwaites was an actor and from the later 1960s manager of the University Book Shop (UBS), before shifting to London in 1974, where he mainly worked in book and recorded music retailing. Noonan, author of the award-winning The Rattle (1963), later a broadcaster and writer as well as an actor, also worked for a while at the UBS, while McCowan was an engineering student and a serious amateur actor performing in plays new to New Zealand by Eugne Ionesco, Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett. He stuck with engineering, though, and was to establish a successful construction company in Western Australia.

Alexander Guyan, 1965.

The Current Offence group, (from left) Noonan, Lindsey Bogle, Guyan, McCowan, 1965.

In 1965 the quartet performed the satirical review Current Offence: Armageddon How Are You? and several other wildly successful shows. Friedlanders portraits of the group were used as promotional images for their appearances at the Wynyard Tavern, in Symonds Street, Auckland. They appeared on flyers and were reproduced in the New Zealand Herald, Auckland Star and New Zealand Womans Weekly. The photographs were not straight reportage. Friedlander closely directed their poses, gestures and looks as well as the overall stagings. These portraits are more imaginative constructions which depict how Marti Friedlander saw them, as much as how they were. A strange, new seam of life emerges from the photographs.

The Current Offence satirists (in several shows joined by Lindsey Bogle, 19442017) offered a kind of theatrical performance that was new to New Zealand: satirical revue in an intimate setting, a hundred-seat caf, with refreshments on hand (the latter inspired by Wellingtons Downstage theatre, at which the group performed in August 1965). Skits with titles like Boozing in Kiwiland, Outward Bounder, Rugby in Eden, On His Holiness Secret Service and Bob Hopeless Show signal their caricatural thrust. The shows of celebrity TV cook Graham Kerr and the presentation of Anthony Stoness bust sculpture of writer Frank Sargeson to the Auckland Public Library were subject to barbed, absurdist parodies. In Under Holy Oake, the then prime minister, Keith Holyoake, was filtered through a deliberate, abbreviated travesty of Dylan Thomass radio drama and stage play Under Milk Wood (1954). The scripts were pungent.

Their scripts and performances (as a very green late teenager I attended several) bring to mind earlier 1960s British satirical cabaret, such as Beyond the Fringe (196066) and That Was the Week That Was (196162), plus a touch of the famed Cambridge Circus. The latter show, which included comedic luminaries-to-come John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Bill Oddie, toured New Zealand to sell-out audiences in 1964. Contemporaneous satirical magazines like the English Private Eye (from 1961), as well as OZ magazine (produced in Sydney from April 1963), come to mind too. OZ, edited by Richard Neville and rough around the edges, mercilessly lampooned the holy cows of Australian society and culture for instance, Robert (Ming, dont go) Menzies, the long-reigning, not-so-Liberal prime minister (193941, 194966) and his cronies, as well as satirising international figures and mishandled affairs, like the expanding Vietnam War.