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Why I read the play I read ALEX LODGE on The Willing Horse
Isobel Andrews’ dry and often straightout bitchy one act comedy from 1941, is a portrait within a portrait of a time in Aotearoa’s theatrical history. Andrews wrote the all-female piece specifically for her theatre group (The Strathmore Play Readers) to perform at British Drama League festivals that were a regular occurrence in the 1940s. In its original publication Andrews lays out in wonderfully bossy detail her advice for other groups using the play, explaining that “poor production” of her script is the main reason she dislikes watching her own work. Honestly, these production notes are some of my favourite writing by Andrews – particularly her note on the verisimilitude of the protagonist’s sandwich-making during the performance: “This needs a lot of rehearsing because there should be no pretence about it. [The protagonist] must keep on making sandwiches. She should have her various jars of paste etc. ranged in front of her on the table, and she should solemnly butter and spread and cut until there is a high pile of sandwiches on the table. Use pre-cut loaves. Wasteful? Not at all! When we did it we always had the sandwiches for supper…”
The festival function of the script is the first portrait that Andrews provides – of an era where theatre was primarily a social activity and especially strong in rural regions as a competitive pastime among married unemployed women. Compare this to the majority of today’s theatre audiences, living in major city centres, largely upper middle class, bourgeois-bohemian types. The world which Andrews was writing for – where stay at home mothers and their kids would put on shows for each other, often original works performed in community halls for a low entry fee – seems like some utopian dream to me. Sue Dunlop’s 2002 thesis The Role of Women in the Culture and Context of a Developing New Zealand Theatre 1920 - 1950 includes a thorough history of the theatre context for these festivals, tracing them from the colonisation era in the 1800s through to the theatre community being stratified into amdram versus professional in the 1970s. Dunlop explains that being involved in a dramatic society for 1930s married women was a kind of occupational therapy – a wife being in work implied that one’s husband wasn’t earning enough to support the household. Being part of a dramatic society was a socially respectable way to keep busy.
