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A GREAT PUSH FORWARD A remarkable life in the development of theatre and education – Sunny Amey in conversation with Mark Amery.
In a Playmarket Annual focusing on community theatre, education, theatre history, and of course the New Zealand play all roads at some point lead to Sunny Amey. If 70 years of theatre history were adapted for film Sunny would pop up Forrest Gump-like in many seminal scenes, including the birth of Playmarket. Last year she was even back on stage, aged 91, at Circa, charming a new generation in The Older the Better. I sat down with her in Paekākāriki to hear about her life in theatre and education between the 1930s and 1970s. The 40 years that have followed need their own separate chapter. I’ve always been involved with drama. In the ‘30s at Seatoun School we read plays from the School Journals. Being a good reader I was always given the lead roles! I did two years at Wellington Teachers’ College
1946-47 after the war, and before then we had quite a strong drama group at Wellington East Girls’ College. We used to have culture clubs and I was always in the plays, mostly British. I can remember playing the man in The Man Who Came to Dinner. We had a very strong drama club at Teachers’ College too. These clubs met on Thursdays for three hours, which was very progressive. I don’t think they do that sort of thing now – students spent three hours a week doing drama or Māori club or art club. There were some very good productions. In 1948 I trained at Christchurch Teachers’ College to be a speech therapist for a year, and in 1951 I went overseas with 20 pounds in my pocket and no return fare. When I was in Britain I went to lots of drama in education courses with some very well known people – that’s looking at child drama and how children act. They used to stage drama in
