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THE LAST WORD Joe Musaphia with advice from a playwright still writing after 60 years.
I have this brilliant idea for a worldwide smash hit play. All I need is a beginning, a middle, and an end. And a title. Theatre companies, directors, actors and agents are nowhere in sight. No one drapes a sympathetic arm over my shoulders and whispers, “Hang in there Joe, you’re a national treasure.” It’s worse when I finish a script and suffer a bout of post-natal depression. Will my baby be healthy? Be heard? Have I given birth to a complete waste of time? I have never used drugs or alcohol as a cure. But I can understand those who do. Me? I conquer the current bout of post-natal depression by moving onto my next babyin-waiting. I blame the trials and tribulations of being a playwright on the fact that I’m besotted with it. For sixty years I have been betrothed to playwriting till death us do part. There are two reasons I can’t give it up. One, what else can I do? Two, I don’t want to do anything else. If you snuck my laptop away I’d sit staring into space like a dummy. As my mate Roger Hall says, “They will find me face down on my keyboard.” Of course no one forced me into becoming a playwright and actor. Sixty years ago I was a commercial artist and cartoonist for The
Listener. I saw John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and dared to think I could write like that. So I wrote a play called Free about three aimless Kiwis in a flat. I wrote it with a ballpoint pen. A friend typed it for me. I sent it to Richard Campion at the New Zealand Players. He phoned to say he would produce it as part of a double bill with James K. Baxter’s Three Women and the Sea. I put the phone down and hollered, “I’m a playwright!” It took me ten years to get another play, Victims, onstage. During that time it was me, and only me, who told me, “do it.” I wrote a lot for radio. The only source of income for a playwright between the demise of the New Zealand Players and the birth of Downstage. Which brings me to my driving force. Money. Adam Macaulay, onetime head of Radio NZ Drama, described me as a playwright who treats it as a job. My words are tools. Rehearsals a workshop. The play merchandise. The stage a showroom. The audience customers. The greatest playwright of them all was a successful businessman, with one eye on the stage and the other on the box office. Okay. I’m a wanker. But that’s a strength. Muhammad Ali hollered, ‘I am the greatest!’ We might dispute that. He didn’t. It kept him going and it keeps me going.
