Diana Dekker.
Kiwi play was commissioned for the 1998 arts festival and a big hit. Fifteen years later it’s back. Playwright Gary Henderson talks to
AN Unseasonable Fall of Snow is a short, sharp show that was so successful on its debut at Downstage in the 1998 New Zealand International Arts Festival that it returned to the theatre three months later. Fifteen years later it will be staged in Wellington again, one of a plethora of works at Bats.
Playwright Gary Henderson was originally commissioned to write a small-cast festival play in one act that ran for about 80 minutes. He set it in Wellington and wrote it for two characters, a young man (Liam) who may have committed a crime and who is cornered and interrogated by an older man (Arthur) in the light of the death of a man the night before.
‘‘I can’t give the game away,’’ Henderson says. ‘‘It was an incident in a circle of my friends that started me thinking and speculating how these things happen.’’
He wrote the play early in his now long and honoured career and in a year when he also won the Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Fringe for Skin Tight. Last year he received the Playmarket Award for his significant contribution to New
Playwright Gary Henderson Zealand Theatre. But, way back at the beginning, he remembers the anxious moments of trying to convince the director he wanted for An Unseasonable Fall of Snow – KC Kelly – of the play’s merit.
‘‘We went to Caffe L’affare, as you do, and I said I had this idea of two guys in a room. Then I talked for 15 or 20 minutes and said would he do it, and KC Kelly said: ‘You got me with the two guys in a room’.’’
The actors in that first production were Damon Andrews and Jeffrey Thomas. For this production his old friend Jed Brophy – Nori the dwarf in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug – plays the part of the older man and Brophy’s son Riley the young man. Jed Brophy, he says, wanted to play the part of Arthur many years ago, but also wanted to wait until he had aged into it ‘‘and now they are just far enough in age for one to be the father and one to be the son’’.
‘‘They’ll be together for the first time on stage. I remember Riley as a one-year-old at rehearsals, coming up the stairs calling out, no idea of theatre protocol.’’
Henderson was living in Wellington when he wrote An Unseasonable Fall of Snow. ‘‘It’s great it’s back in town because it’s set in Wellington and mentions Wellington places. By that I mean 1998 Wellington places.’’
He hasn’t been tempted to revisit the script of the play for its latest outing.
‘‘I don’t know if I could write something like that now. I think some things I could do better now.
‘‘Every writer or creator of anything knows you see a piece of work and think you could make it better. You could spend your life making it better or think that’s what I was doing at that age and now I’m doing something different. I always enjoy seeing it and seeing the interpretation of my work and to think these people have spent so much of their lives and energy on something I dreamed up. I don’t want to get blase about that.’’
Henderson’s other plays, most of which have been staged in Wellington, include Mo and Jess Kill Susie, Home Land and Peninsula.
Henderson is known as one of the country’s top playwrights but he’s had a convoluted career. He’s also a director, teacher and mentor. But as a child he pined to be a meteorologist and wrote to Nasa, ‘‘thinking I could get into research’’. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Victoria University where he studied after leaving Naenae College.
Then, more interested in music than mathematics, he did a music education programme at the university and trained to be a teacher. At Parkway Intermediate in Wainuiomata he began writing and producing the school’s annual grand production, decided he had found his calling, and returned to Victoria University after five years, in 1985, to study theatre and film. There he met Jed Brophy’s wife and through her, Jed, ‘‘and have since had a continuing friendship with the family’’.
He left Wellington for Auckland to become one of a pool of directors for television’s Shortland Street.
‘‘It gave me valuable skills in visual story-telling and being able to work under pressure and make decisions and live with them. Sometimes you’re in a situation where it really doesn’t matter what option you choose but you’re the one that has to make the decision.’’
Before the shift to Auckland he wrote An Unseasonable Fall of Snow.
‘‘It was the last thing I did before I moved to work on Shortland Street. I still think of myself as a Wellington person.’’ An Unseasonable Fall of Snow is at Bats Theatre (Out of Site), Wellington from tomorrow until February 1.