SAM BROOKS
Kiwi theatre’s iconoclast
When you boil it down, playwright Sam Brooks thinks most theatre is rubbish. More specifically, most playwrights, including all the famous ones, have a tin ear when it comes to writing women and people of colour. And most work at our main theatres is stuck in the 1980s.
Brooks is just 28 but, with a rising star reputation, 20 professionally produced plays on his CV and multiple awards, he reckons he’s earned his right to speak up.
His latest play, Actressexual (at Auckland’s Q Theatre until next weekend) is essentially a statement of that belief and a challenge to the establishment: ‘‘I’ve worked very hard on my career and my craft, and it feels safe enough that I can throw the first stone.’’
A revolving cast of guest actresses read parts from plays (as recent as 2017) in which Brooks feels the writing of female characters is substandard. He sits alongside, and whips up something for them to perform which he reckons is better.
While none of the source pieces are identified, he says you’ll recognise some. He lets slip that one is by Roger Hall, probably the most known and feted of living Kiwi playwrights. If Brooks is taking on sacred cows, Hall is the wagyu of the herd. Hall, he says, did great things in drawing people to the theatre, but is not alone in writing for ‘‘rich, old white people’’. Others, he says, haven’t changed in decades, and ‘‘if your way of writing is stuck in that era, then your thinking is also probably stuck somewhere in that era.’’
Brooks believes himself capable of handling the likely backlash. During his undergraduate performing and screen arts course at Auckland’s Unitec, he would ask his tutors for tougher notes on his work. ‘‘I had and still have a very tough skin. [I wasn’t there] to make nice, I am here to get better and be a good, great writer. There is a general softness around both giving and receiving notes in this industry that infuriates me and always has.’’
His flatmate, actor Dan Veint, says Brooks is ruthless with his own work, attending rehearsals, asking actors for direct feedback and making instant cuts: ‘‘Pieces I’ve thought were really beautiful . . . he’ll be quick to make a decision about whether they are necessary.’’
Consider Actressexual, a pretty tough set of critic’s notes for Hall et al. The prospect of a kerfuffle appears to amuse, not concern Brooks. ‘‘I don’t really have anything to fear, I don’t think, from other playwrights, because they can’t really do anything for me. And frankly, I have enough of a platform now that I feel really comfortable that people trust the things I say and it is not just an empty ‘hesucks, he-sucks’: it has been thought through.’’
It’s said with a sort of smiling insouciance that makes it all rather acceptable. Brooks possesses a surprisingly endearing mix of braggadocio and self-awareness: when he mentions winning the Bruce Mason playwriting award, he adds the rider he was aggrieved at not winning it a year earlier. ‘‘That’s my ego and hubris speaking,’’ he says. ‘‘But also my hope.’’
From Papakura, in Auckland’s south, Brooks travelled across the city to a sportsmad Catholic high school, Sacred Heart. You could imagine an arty, openly gay teenager from a distant suburb finding that difficult. Brooks did not. ‘‘I actually had a great time at high school,’’ he says. ‘‘I don’t remember any [problems]. But I’ve always had a fairly unshakeable ‘I’m smart, I’m nice, I’m fine’.’’
His father left when he was 2, and hasn’t seen him since he was 6; Brooks says he has no curiosity about him. He was raised an only child by his mother, Kathie, who he says was ‘‘incredibly supportive’’ of his writing. She died in October 2014, and his grandmother died six months later, leaving him alone in the world at just 24. ‘‘I am a full-on orphan,’’ he says. ‘‘It feels weird saying that now. It sounds like I am older.’’
By then, Brooks was already an awardwinning playwright, but it wasn’t a living. ‘‘I would enter heaps of things and just hope I won, and I did win enough that I would be fine, but it was a very anxious time in my life, just hoping I would win prizes.’’ He recalls turning up to one ceremony and finding out he’d not won the $2000 prize – money he was counting on to cover rent. ‘‘I was like, ‘F..., I don’t care about the award, I just need that money’ . . . that’s a ludicrous situation.’’
A week after his mother died, he enrolled in a journalism postgraduate course at AUT, as if seeking some career security. He figured there were enough shared skills between playwriting and journalism to make the switch. He didn’t enjoy the course. Partly that was fatigue – he wrote and produced six plays that year, while also dealing with his grandmother’s estate – and partly because he felt unsuited to hard news. He didn’t want to doorstep villains, he wanted to write criticism. ‘‘It was a nuts time in my life, and I don’t know how I survived it really.’’
In part, it was through finding surrogate relations in the family of his best friend, exShortland St actor Geordie Holibar. AUT journalism lecturer Greg Treadwell – Holibar’s uncle – says it was clear Brooks had the ability, if not the desire. ‘‘Sam has a great bulls... detector – I guess he is an observer as a person and so he spots snake oil a mile away, which is a great quality for a journalist,’’ he says. ‘‘It wouldn’t surprise me if he was, in the end, one, a really well-known playwright and, two, an absolute icon of the queer community
‘‘I don’t really have anything to fear, I don’t think, from other playwrights, because they can’t really do anything for me.’’
because he has that potential. He’s a serious talent in a lot of ways.’’
A chastened Brooks re-immersed himself in the theatre world, but retained the belief the journalism thing would also end up just fine: ‘‘It’s hubris, utter hubris, it really should not have worked out.’’ But it did. He got some freelance work, including theatre reviewing for Stuff. Duncan Greive, editor of the pop culture website The Spinoff, offered him a fulltime job; Brooks, who had never had such a thing, initially demurred, then agreed to jobshare a short-term contract editing comedy coverage. He’s now the fulltime culture editor. After the solitude and strange hours of the playwright, he found a structured life initially strange and now ‘‘completely healthy’’.
None of this slowed his playwriting. As well as his 20 plays since high school, 10 sit in the metaphorical sock drawer, finished but judged not fit to stage. Even if he were a fulltime, celebrated playwright, he couldn’t imagine slowing down.
His breakthrough was 2016’s Burn Her (being revived in Wellington later this year), which followed the fortunes of a young female MP in a small party elected to Parliament for the first time. Its success set a bar he feels he now has to meet every time: ‘‘Everything from now on will be in relation to that show – that’s how people see me now, Sam Brooks (Burn Her) . . . it’s a nice problem to have.’’
He stayed with politics (broadly) with the expansive Jacinda (2018), which took the PM’s name and the events of her election and used them as a backdrop to various narratives. It was written as the graduation show for the Actors’ Workshop, so needed 16 roughly equal parts. It was a tough brief. ‘‘I had to figure out what is a plot that can work with 16 actors, that will satisfy someone who is not there seeing their sons or friends.’’
He admits the play had its problems, but in typical style, reckons no other playwright could have turned it around in the time he had. It was, of course, unwieldy in parts, but a highlight was a mocking but almost fond portrayal of the ACT MP David Seymour. Ardern autographed the script, but didn’t see the show; Seymour did, Brooks says, and apparently liked it.
A popular presumption might be that a stutter is a function of shyness. But Brooks has a severe one, and is far from retiring. An extravagant dresser, he’s wearing purple suede curl-toed boots when we meet. He loves talking, and he loves socialising. ‘‘I can speak for ages about me, frankly.’’
At times, the stutter seems to worsen when he’s talking of something difficult – such as his mother’s death – but he says there’s no pattern to it. He avoids phone calls, and warns interview subjects, but otherwise, ‘‘it doesn’t impact my life in a way I’ve ever found hugely awful. Other people think about it a lot more than I do, and that’s interesting’’. For him, it’s a dull distraction from more interesting topics – instead, he addressed it on stage with his 2015 one-man show Stutterpop, where he lipsynched, discussed his love life and did a stuttering Q&A.
Treadwell says Brooks uses it to his advantage: people have to slow down and listen to what he says. ‘‘Sam is really comfortable in his own skin. And he’s just waiting for other people to be comfortable with him.’’