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REALISE THE
HOPE Paul Maunder on why Dean Parker’s significant legacy of plays should be standard fare.
Auckland playwright Dean Parker died suddenly during the lockdown, so his death could not be acknowledged by presence and by ritual, which has left an uncomfortable absence. It is like being informed that someone is missing in action. I want to take this opportunity to suggest the importance of the substantial body of work Dean wrote and ways in which we might begin to consider it, together with his performance as author. This is important, for too often (even while acknowledging the work of Playmarket and John Smythe) things slip away. Plays are not often read, theatre performances disappear and there has never been an important reviewer such as Kenneth Tynan in the UK, or Katherine Brisbane in Australia, monitoring the development of theatre in this country (despite Bruce Mason's efforts to play such a role in his later years). With Dean, his influences will need to be noted: a provincial working class Napier childhood, the density of Catholicism (both spiritually and aesthetically) as religion and schooling, a mother who loved the American musical,
a father who preferred the races, the London of the swinging sixties, the bitter Irish struggle, and the fact that he became (and remained) a communist. Let me qualify this last point. He was a member of the Socialist Unity Party for a period but realised the writer always begins with a blank page and must follow his instincts rather than obey a central committee. Nevertheless, the area of interest was set: the struggle of the working class to reproduce itself in conditions of relative decency is opposed, generally, by the efforts of capital to reproduce itself and accumulate. Dean Parker, as writer, was then a worker working in opposition to the interests of capital. Why theatre, or, if we include his work in film and television, why drama? Subjectivity does come into it. He was a playful man. His one man piece, Wonderful is perhaps closest to a personal document. Within this framework, the content entered his workshop and emerged as scripts; and he was prolific – 58 plays covering the swinging sixties, adaptations of classics, Labour Party history, National Party skulduggery, our
