Heroes ‘If there were going to be women’
Storytelling rangatira Rene´e talks with Craig Sisterson about surprising audiences, exploring blots on Aotearoa’s past and present, and creating art that has real-life impact. in my plays, they were going to be
The library event was lovely, as were the conversations with audience members afterwards. But it was the little note slipped into her hand that really struck Rene´ e. A reminder of how art and entertainment can be so vital; how the fictional can not only reflect but impact real lives.
‘‘I was down in Dunedin with Mary, my publisher, a couple of years ago and I was speaking at the library there,’’ says Rene´ e, a poet, playwright and novelist whose extraordinary storytelling career was honoured with the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2018.
‘‘After the talk a woman came up to me and handed me a little envelope. She said she’d come from the West Coast for the talk. So we talked briefly and I thanked her, and when she’d gone I opened it up and it was a card that just said, ‘Dear Rene´ e, thank you for saving my life’.
‘‘It so touched my heart. Somewhere in those shows we did around the South Island, something I said or something we presented must have touched her in a very deep sort of way.’’
‘‘Those shows’’ were a string of plays Rene´ e wrote during the 1980s-1990s like Setting The Table, Asking for It, and her Wednesday to Come trilogy that broke new ground by crafting powerful lead roles for women while exploring a variety of feminist, takatā pui [intimate companion of the same sex], and working class issues.
New Zealand theatre was changed forever by someone who’d begun writing her first play after her 50th birthday. The world noticed. Rene´ e (Ngā ti Kahungunu) was a keynote speaker at the First International Women Playwrights Conference in New York in 1988. She did a readings tour across Europe. Lorae Parry MNZM, the first female playwright to become Writer in Residence at
Victoria University, praised Rene´ e for kicking down the door for many women that followed.
Looking back on her first play, Setting the Table – which she wrote ‘‘like a mad woman’’ in a few days and nights after a sudden opportunity arose and she’d told a white lie to Mercury Theatre about how far she was from finishing (she hadn’t started) –
Rene´ e says it was ‘‘a great surprise to audiencegoers’’ when it was performed in 1982.
‘‘Here were four lesbian women living in Ponsonby, just exactly like what was happening but never appeared onstage, and the only man in it had about five minutes,’’ says Rene´ e with a sharp chuckle, from her home in Otaki.
‘‘Which was totally the other way around to a normal sort of play; usually the male was the lead and female actors were there either as his lover or sister or mother or something like that. I wasn’t going to have that. If there were going to be any heroes in my plays, they were going to be women. So that’s how I started.’’
Four decades on, Rene´ e continues to go her own way. Talking with her is a delight. She’s sharp and funny, warm and candid.
After receiving the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, Rene´ e took her childhood (and lifelong) love of murder mysteries to the next level, publishing The Wild Card the year she turned 90. Her first-ever crime novel, it was later shortlisted for the 2020 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel.
‘‘I’ve been reading it since I was about 10,’’ she says. ‘‘I read somewhere in a novel, I think it was a Dorothy L Sayers novel, where Harriet and Peter Wimsey are talking about the value or not of crime novels and their take on it was that we present a kind of ideal world, or a world which people hope it might be, where evildoers are punished. Quite often in real life they’re not.’’
Rene´ e’s second small-town mystery, Blood Matters, was published in November. In her novels, like with her plays, Rene´ e threads issues she cares about through the forms she loves.
‘‘My novels are all stemming from either things I’ve heard, things I’ve experienced, things that people have told me, or developments in our history,’’ she says, noting her 1995 novel Does This Make Sense to You? centered on young pregnant girls being sent away to very strict, church-run hostels ‘‘where they were worked into the ground and made to give up their baby’’.
That practice was ‘‘a real blot’’ on our history, says Rene´ e. And while it no longer happens, the impact has lingered through the decades. She still gets emails from readers about that book.
In The Wild Card, Rene´ e used an engaging smalltown mystery and a tough, courageous heroine to explore the New Zealand state home system and its history of abuses. Former state ward Ruby investigates the long-ago drowning of her friend Betty while they were in care at the now-abandoned Porohiwi Children’s Home. But why is she attacked by a balaclava-wearing man?
The themes hit close to home for Rene´ e, who so easily could have ended up in state care after her Pā kehā father committed suicide when she was four years old, leaving his Mā ori wife Rose and their three young children to fend for themselves during the Great Depression. Rose was advised to put Rene´ e, Val, and Jimmy in state care, but fought to keep the family together.
Blood Matters takes readers back to Porohiwi but, unlike Sayers, Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, Rene´ e doesn’t use a recurring sleuth. There’s no Poirot or Marple, no Inspector Alleyn.
Instead, Rene´ e’s Porohiwi mysteries spotlight a wider cast who live, love and die in the small town. In Blood Matters, Puti Durrell has inherited Mainly Crime, a secondhand bookshop, from her sister Ana along with guardianship of 10-year-old budding private eye Bella Rose. Then Puti finds her estranged grandfather Matthew strangled in his sitting room, wearing a Judas mask. She’s followed, she’s threatened, and another murder strikes even closer to home.
It’s a wonderful mystery, melding ‘‘Golden Age’’ touches with modern, Kiwi sensibilities. The snippets of local events to start each chapter are a delight, as are the comments on crime fiction classics as well as modern authors like Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and our own Vanda Symon. While there’s warmth and wit to offset the dark deeds and
‘‘‘It seems to me there’s a segregation between a ‘novel’ and a ‘crime novel’ that should not be there... I have no patience whatsoever with people who make that distinction. Something is written well, or it’s not.’’’ RENE´ E
most of the violence happens offstage, important issues like misogyny, racism and child abuse are canvassed.
‘‘Because my tastes don’t run to very violent sorts of crime in my reading, I don’t go for that in my writing,’’ says Rene´ e. ‘‘I set things more around character and the life of a town in Aotearoa. That also gives the story depth, I think, because you get to know the people over time.’’
Currently writing her third Porohiwi mystery, Rene´ e has little time for the perceived division, in some quarters, between ‘‘literature’’ and popular fiction like mysteries and romance.
‘‘It seems to me there’s a segregation between a ‘novel’ and a ‘crime novel’ that should not be there. They’re all novels, and one kind deals with problems of one sort, and another deals with a crime and the effects of it on the people around it. I have no patience whatsoever with people who make that distinction. Something is written well, or it’s not.’’
Rene´ e feels the same about romantic fiction, ‘‘which gets very bad press sometimes from literary people’’, having known successful romance writers who work very hard and write very well.
‘‘There’s the same range of writing as there is in any other writing. I’ve never been able to understand why one can’t read them all, because of the various pleasures they give you.
‘‘After all, Jane Austen is really just Mills & Boon with more words.’’