Gallipoli through a contemporary lens
Tara Shaskey talks with playwright Dave Armstrong ahead of his show Anzac Eve at the Taranaki Arts Festival.
How did you become a playwright? My parents took me to a lot of plays as a kid. At that time, New Zealand didn’t have any professional playwrights. My grandmother used to write plays and little sketches for the Country Women’s Institute. She sent one of them to me and I performed it at school. It went down really well and that gave me the bug.
What’s the first hook that begins a play for you? Sometimes it’s a little scenario, or a question. The hook for Anzac Eve was a combination of working on a lot of different World War I commemorations at the same time as New Zealand soldiers were being killed in Afghanistan. I wanted to write a contemporary play about WWI so I had the idea of Kiwi and Aussie backpackers descending on Gallipoli for a booze-up and possible hook-up.
How does it feel seeing your words come to life? It’s absolutely amazing to watch an audience laugh or cry to words you have written. It’s especially true when those people are a different age or culture to me, or they come from a different part of the country.
What motivated you to pen this play? I wanted to commemorate WWI in a different way. I didn’t want to write a play set it in 1914–18 with soldiers in uniforms, as with so many WWI plays. Then I had the idea about young people celebrating Anzac Day in Gallipoli today, and that got me really motivated. With New Zealand and Australian soldiers still involved in Afghanistan and Iraq today, I asked myself the question, ‘what have we really learned over the last 100 years?’
Can you describe what your creative process was like when writing it? I had a deadline to finish the first draft of the play but I was so busy with writing for other WWI projects that I hadn’t got much written. My wife booked me into a motel on a remote windswept beach and I spent three days working almost around the clock. At the end of it all I had the first draft of the play. I then had a two day workshop with the director, Jamie McCaskill, and the actors, and we pulled the play apart. I then rewrote it and we had another workshop.
What do you hope the audience’s take away will be? I hope audiences will laugh and have a good time, because much of Anzac Eve is an entertaining comedy. However, I also hope it will cause them to think about war, not just in the past but war today. I hope people will think deeply about whether New Zealand should continue getting involved in wars in other countries, as we did, with tragic consequences, in Gallipoli.
Since touring began, do you feel you’ve helped the contemporary audience have a better understanding of the Gallipolean tragedy? We’ve certainly been told we have. What’s been great is that a lot of teachers have said it’s been quite hard getting their students interested in a war that happened 100 years ago. But seeing funny and contemporary young characters in Anzac Eve talk about WWI has made it easier for students to connect with the history.
* Anzac Eve will be staged at the Theatre Royal on Wednesday, August 23 and Thursday, August 24.