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

role in Afghanistan, neoliberalism, and not surprisingly, he had a fascination with the 1930s generation of intellectual lefties like John Mulgan and the diplomatic intrigues of war and post war. He researched thoroughly and was hugely knowledgeable. He never wrote of the Irish struggle but instead was a key activist in a local organisation determined to raise consciousness around the issue. Film and television work is always more collective and hopefully better paid than theatre, for the writer is operating within a capitalist process involving large sums of money. In order to try and realise that hope, Dean, along with others, set up a trade union for writers which remains at least partially successful. His was a world view unsuited to the intricacies of postmodernism with its fragmentations and tributaries, for he retained a meta-narrative which embraced diversity (a braided river) rather than diverse narratives being ends in themselves. To take an example of this, in The Man That Lovelock Couldn’t Beat, Tom Morehu, a Māori, is a working class lad taking on Jack Lovelock, a Pākehā bourgeois, and ends up an internationalist martyr in the Spanish Civil War. Aesthetically, Dean wrote within the conventional three-act realist form, but with Brechtian and cabaret tendencies, with sometimes a venturing into folk theatre. There is always a tension in his work, for the three-act play is usually centred on middle class family dynamics and skeletons in the closet, whereas the Marxist praxis is about rejecting mystery and revealing the wider structure of society. These factors created career difficulties, for the local theatre market is geared toward serving a largely middle class or petit bourgeois clientele. As a consequence Dean had problems getting his plays on stage. He required a national theatre, for his topics were often of national importance, but the decision (perhaps inevitable geographically) by the Arts Council in the 1970s to fund provincial theatres rather than a national

theatre has meant exactly that, provincial theatres and provincial theatre. Dean had an ongoing battle with the Auckland Theatre Company and the needs of the ‘Remuera’ audience. However, it is tribute to the strength of his writing, his tenacity and that of his advocates that many plays did get produced by small independents and some by major companies, even when Dean was berating them for their general lack of courage. Dean’s career leads one inevitably to Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay, 'The Author as Producer', in which Benjamin argues for the need to transform cultural production rather than simply placing socialist content within the capitalist machinery. But Dean never saw himself in the role of theatre manager or even cultural activist (he’d never have time to write). However he occasionally devised a community event of great vibrancy, including an annual James Joyce night at a Karangahape Road pub. Hopefully, as we realise his absence, more of Dean’s work will be produced, in a variety of ways, from student productions to cooperatives to mainstream theatre. In fact, Dean Parker’s work should now become standard fare throughout the process of reproducing and nurturing theatre in this country.