Cooking capers
Hudson and Halls Live!
Please indulge me by: Getting a cup of tea, calling up Youtube and typing in Hudson and Halls. And now just watch, watch as the magic unfolds.
Peter Hudson and David Halls are cooking chicken. They are wearing starched white button-up shirts, with little black bow ties. They are bickering, bustling and bitingly funny. And when Hudson tells Halls to ‘‘shut up’’ the moment is laugh-inducing rather than cringeworthy, because it is just so real.
Their cooking show ran on New Zealand television from 1976 to 1986. It moved quickly into a prime-time spot and consistently ranked in the weekly top-five programmes. Their camp and off-the-cuff slapstick humour won the hearts of a nation and they neither confirmed nor denied their sexuality.
‘‘We don’t know if they are gay,’’ the TVNZ publicity read, ‘‘but they certainly are merry’’.
Now, another cup-of-tea-pause here, because to understand the significance of this unlikely pair we need to think about what was going on in the decade of their TV stardom.
Being homosexual was illegal. Robert Muldoon was the prime minister. Men were men, women were in the kitchen and two outwardly gay men were suddenly on TV.
It is rather wonderful and in hindsight, the fact that these two men who were very much a loving couple were not just accepted by New Zealand, but absolutely adored, is extraordinary.
And Centrepoint Theatre is celebrating that and them, the two men who cooked, caught ovens on fire, drank the cooking sherry and made raisins in meals a thing, will be brought back to life.
There will be an entire Christmas dinner cooked on stage complete with a very stuffed turkey and rapidly melting cream castles. The viewer becomes the live studio audience, the much-loved medium of the time, and director Dan Pengelly says it will be a hoot.
‘‘They were naturally funny. It’s just the way they were with each other. You watch the old clips and you just think ‘this is amazing’. It was just so quirky and everyone loved them.’’
Two fine New Zealand actors have been tasked with the job of bringing that spontaneous brilliance back – Peter Hambleton, as David Halls, and Andrew Laing, as Peter Hudson. Then in tow, playing the studio director is Centrepoint Theatre’s own managing director Kate Louise Elliott.
Laing says being in the play is an honour. ‘‘It is the funnest play to do. [It’s] exhausting and frightening – we have to actually produce a four-course Christmas dinner each night – but just so wonderful.’’
Laing is friends with Kip Chapman and Todd Emerson, who wrote the play with Sophie Roberts. He was living with them when they were creating it, so there was some serious binge-watching.
‘‘We are playing a version of them, but a lot of the actual things that were in the shows, the things that really happened, have found their way into the play. It’s too good not to. They were delightful and just so damned funny.’’
Hambleton says the relationship between the two men is also a fascinating thing. It was both tumultuous and enduring, ending in tragedy when Hudson died of cancer in 1992 and Halls, a year later and grief-stricken, took his own life.
‘‘They came from very different backgrounds. Peter came from a life of privilege, whereas David had a more working-class background and I think it’s fair to say that David was a bit more flamboyant, but Peter had his own style.
‘‘Their love was pretty instantaneous and for all its ups and downs and frailties and brutalities, it lasted to the point where they were two parts of the same being.’’
So, it’s finding those nuances, the physicality and the cadences and it’s about capturing the spontaneity, which really was a bit of magic.
Elliott is there to raise the humour to an even higher level. One of life’s naturally funny people, she hasn’t been on stage for a while – she’s been running it instead.
And Pengelly, who has showed his worth this year not only as the theatre’s artistic director, but as a director who finds the soul and truth in comedy that makes laughter and tears such a hand-inhand thing.
The set, if you are old enough to remember the 80s, is a step back in time. Designed by Daniel Williams, the first microwave to come on the market is there, the one where you got a free cooking class on purchase. There is a lot of yellow, brown and orange kitsch and everything you see actually works. Eggs will be beaten, lettuce will be tossed and anything could happen.
Now, put down your cup of tea and go and find the Youtube clip titled ‘‘cheese grating’’ and the other one where they make creamy chicken crepes and bicker like hungry chickens. They are gold. The best thing you will see all day. You are welcome.
Hudson And Halls Live! opens at Palmerston North’s Centrepoint Theatre on November 10 and runs until November 21.