Bruce Mason - The End of the Golden Weather

About a year ago, I was invited by the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation to prepare a television programme to celebrate the 500th performance of The End of the Golden Weather; it reached the screen in another form, and was shown on all channels in the Looking at New Zealand series on Sunday, 14 September, 1969, directed by John Barningham and produced by Bute Hewes. My original TV script gives a fuller account of the experience, and I offer it here, exactly as it was submitted, omitting only technical terms of the TV trade.

AUTHOR can be seen advancing to table and chair; unseen applause. Bow.

AUTHOR. 'I invite you to join me, in a voyage into the past, to that territory of the heart we call childhood. '

Camera recedes, showing AUTHOR mumbling on a TV screen; voice fades to murmur, as he says:

'Consider, if you will, Te Parenga. '

He drones on, behind the montage of press clippings, reviews, the published text, the two record covers. Camera now reveals a studio, the AUTHOR and INTERVIEWER, facing each other.

TITLES : The Golden Weather Odyssey, or Fleecings from the Golden Weather, by Bruce Mason.

INTERVIEWER. The End of the Golden Weather. How many times now?

AUTHOR. I lost count after 500.

INTERVIEWER. Almost a way of life.

AUTHOR. Almost.

INTERVIEWER. You must have asked yourself: will it ever end?

AUTHOR. I still do it: between thirty and fifty performances every year.

INTERVIEWER. And you never tire of it?

AUTHOR. Never. You see I've no aids at all. Table, chair, voice, gesture. Nothing else. So it has to be re-created on the spot, every time. Every audience is different; every audience a new challenge.

INTERVIEWER. And you've taken it everywhere.

AUTHOR. You name it: I've played it.

INTERVIEWER. Blenheim.

AUTHOR. No.

INTERVIEWER. Alexandra.

AUTHOR. No. You've picked the only two. But everywhere else, of any size. Every city, town, village, hamlet, petrol-station, it sometimes seems.

INTERVIEWER. How did it all begin?

AUTHOR. Well, in 1959, I'd come to the end of a road. I'd written a few plays, assembled a mountain of criticism, done some producing. I'd had a crack at all the arts and trades of theatre. But it hadn't got me anywhere.

INTERVIEWER. Where did you want to get?

AUTHOR. I just wanted to feel that I had a calling for theatre and that this calling would at length be recognised, so that I could give my life and best energies to it. But you can't work in a vacuum. A man won't write symphonies, if there's no orchestra to play them. There was no solid theatrical framework here, no ladder to climb so that, feet on the the first rung, you could go upwards to the second. You created no mana, no reputation or authority to justify your work. In fact, to most people, it wasn't work at all, just pretentious frivolity.

INTERVIEWER. What about the New Zealand Players?

AUTHOR. A flash in the pan, alas, though a flash that lasted for seven years.

INTERVIEWER. But didn't you write for them?

AUTHOR. Yes. Sketches and pieces for their Schools' Quartets and one full-length play, which has become my best-known: The Pohutukawa Tree. But at no stage could I consider that this was opening up a career. It was always and only, a spare-time job. Hence the desperation.