A radical revue

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1960s, drama

Part of the programme for the 1963 revue. Image courtesy of Jocelyn Harris.

Theatre was a popular Otago student pursuit in the mid-twentieth century and the dramatic society was one of the biggest societies on campus. During the 1940s it shifted focus from light popular drama to more serious works, and even some original plays. Meanwhile, the capping concert provided an opportunity to present shorter comic material. The capping show was always somewhat subversive, but in 1963 a student group put on a revue which took this to a new level.

Yes or No as the Mood Takes Us: The Revue with the Knife in it made numerous hits on bourgeois society and reflected the emerging youth culture of the 1960s. This was a period when some young people – many of them students – were unhappy with the conservative and conformist mores of New Zealand society. But any serious social criticism in the revue was overlaid with wit (the performers were fans of the great British radio comedy, The Goon Show). Targets of their satire included royalty, the clergy, politicians, radio, television and the press. The knife, reported the Otago Daily Times, was “wielded with varying degrees of deadliness”.

The cast/writers were a brilliant group. Jocelyn Harris recalls writer Bill Manhire recounting that he attended the revue as a high school student and was very impressed; he was rather disappointed when he arrived at university to discover the campus wasn’t as filled with witty people as he had hoped. Several of those involved went on to impressive academic careers. Some were in science: Ann Justice (later Ann Wirz-Justice) in organic chemistry and John Harris in physiology. Michael Neill continued his interest in drama during a distinguished career in English at the University of Auckland, while Jocelyn Harris was Professor of English at Otago. After completing an MA, Graham Mitchell became an Anglican vicar. Michael Noonan and Alexander Guyan made their careers in drama. Guyan, who died in 1991, was a playwright and actor. Noonan is a highly acclaimed writer for television, whose credits include the innovative New Zealand dramas Pukemanu, The Governor and Close to Home. Bill Southgate, who arranged and played the music for the revue, became a distinguished conductor and composer. Among others involved were Rodney Kennedy, drama tutor and art collector (director); Colin James, now a political commentator (stage manager); and Philip Woollaston, a future politician (business manager).

The bill of fare as it appeared in the programme. Image courtesy of Jocelyn Harris.

Some clever publicity helped bring people to the show. Weeks before their performance the cast appeared, stylishly dressed and posed beneath Queen Victoria’s statue, in photographs in the ODT and Critic; they also posed in a George Street shop window to attract the attention of passersby. Their invitations to various celebrities, including Prime Minister Keith Holyoake, philosopher Bertrand Russell and cartoonist Chas Addams, brought replies they used for further publicity.

The 1963 capping concert was something of a disaster, apart from the accomplished performance of the traditional sextet. “Concert failed: lewd, stewed, booed” read the headline in Critic. In contrast with the scathing review of the capping show, the student paper found quite a bit to praise in Yes or No. In all, it was “a refreshingly novel entertainment after the ordeal of Capping Concert, and much appreciated by the audience.” The Evening Star noted the revue’s connection to the popular Beyond the Fringe Oxford University production, but approved of the manner in which its satire focussed “on the New Zealand way of life.” A parody of Bruce Mason’s End of the Golden Weather received particular critical approval, as did the acting of Noonan, Mitchell and Neill, “who delivered the attack with vigour.” Guyan’s turn as Kennedy holding a telephone conversation with Khrushchev also pleased a press reviewer.

Getting the tone of a comic production right is tricky, but the Yes or No revue met the challenge where the capping show of that year failed. Dunedin residents were, it seems, ready to see their idols satirised. Do you have any memories to share of this radical revue or other student productions of the era?

The drama of French

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1960s, 1970s, drama, French, languages, theatre studies

These days Allen Hall is full of drama – it is the home of the university’s theatre studies programme and venue for its weekly lunchtime theatre performances. But this building, which housed the student union until the current union building opened in 1974, also witnessed various drama performances long before theatre studies appeared on the scene. During the 1960s and 1970s the Department of Modern Languages (which split into separate French, German and Russian departments around 1970) staged plays in French and German. Some of the 1960s plays took place off-campus at the Globe Theatre, but by the 1970s Allen Hall had become the main venue.

Felicity Brown (Ismene) and Dorothy Page (Antigone) in ‘Antigone’, 1965. Photograph courtesy of Roger Collins.

The French play was not a formal part of the department’s teaching programme, but an extracurricular activity involving a lot of hard work and fun. Staff, students, former students and friends of the department all played roles. The productions revealed considerable talent, and not just for acting. The programme for Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, presented in 1965, was handsomely designed by John Brown and printed on a handpress by French lecturer Roger Collins, while William Southgate, destined to become a well-known conductor and composer, took charge of the music. The title role of Antigone went to Dorothy Page, later head of Otago’s Department of History.

Priscilla McQueen (Toinette), Malcolm Glenny (Thomas Diafoirus), Ray Stone (Argan) and Jack Thompson (Monsieur Diafoirus) in ‘Le Malade Imaginaire’, Allen Hall, 1971. Photograph courtesy of Roger Collins.

Works by the great comic playwright Molière (1622-1673) were always a popular choice. Those produced at Otago included Les Femmes Savantes (1964), Tartuffe (1966), Le Malade Imaginaire (1971) and Le Mariage Forcé/Les Précieuses Ridicules (1974). The Evening Star commented in its review of Le Malade Imaginaire that “the fact that the play is spoken in French did not deter a large audience; and by way of reward for facing a bleak, wet night, they were entertained by a piece for the theatre as lively and as enjoyable as when it was first presented in 1673.” The “lively, warm-hearted, completely entertaining” production ran for three performances. French lecturer Ray Stone played the hypochondriac Argan, but the best-known name on the programme today is that of poet Cilla McQueen, who graduated MA from Otago in 1971. She played the role of Argan’s servant Toinette.

Roger Collins (Clitandre) and Molly Anderson (Belise) in ‘Les Femmes Savantes’, Allen Hall, 1964. Photograph courtesy of Roger Collins.

I am grateful to Roger Collins for sharing with me his programmes and photographs of these productions. Did you ever perform in, or attend, one of Otago’s French or German plays?

Otago in fiction

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1910s, 1930s, books, campus fiction, classics, drama, film, Rhodes scholars, writers

Many talented creative writers have graced the university with their presence. Acclaimed fiction writers who studied at Otago have published in a wide variety of genres: crime novelist Vanda Symon, popular fantasy writer Juliet Marillier, master of the short story A.P. Gaskell, literary novelist Fiona Farrell, and of course the incomparable Janet Frame. Many of New Zealand’s greatest writers have also spent time at Otago, not as students, but as holders of the Burns Fellowship (a few, like Farrell and Frame, have done both). And let’s not forget the staff: did you know that the talented Liam McIlvanney, Professor of Scottish Studies, moonlights as a crime writer, or that Rogelio Guedea, senior lecturer in the Spanish programme, is a best-selling novelist in Mexico?

Despite all this creative power, the university has seldom featured as a setting for fiction; ‘campus fiction’ has not, it seems, been a popular genre in this country. That makes the 1970 novel of Dan Davin, Not here, not now, all the more interesting. The book is closely based on the experiences of Davin and his wife Winnie Gonley as Otago students of the 1930s. It centres on Martin Cody, a brilliant young working class Catholic boy from Southland. Cody is an arts student who drinks, dances, plays rugby, falls in love (more than once), writes, questions his religion, and eventually wins a Rhodes Scholarship (after failing to make it in his first attempt thanks to a rumour which, if true, would reflect badly on his moral character). Many other still familiar institutions of Otago student life are vividly portrayed in the novel: disputes within the students’ association, controversies over what should appear in Critic, slaving late at night over books, and finding kindred spirits at a religious group (the Catholic Students’ Club – now CathSoc). Of course some commonplace aspects of 1930s life have long gone, including the once ubiquitous figure of the landlady, who featured large in the lives of the many students living in private board.

University of Otago Latin picnic at Whare Flat, 1932. Dan Davin is on the far right, with Angus Ross in front of him and Christopher Johnson to Davin’s right. Other students include Frank Hall (back left), Winnie McQuilkan (centre front) and Ida Lawson (in dark jacket behind her). The Classics staff, Prof Thomas Dagger Adams and Isabel Turnbull, are at front left.
Image courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library, Ref: 1/2-166716-F. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22884184

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of student life; as reviewer Michael Beveridge commented in Landfall, “as a novelist Davin has been a first-rate historian”. Davin is probably best known for his novels and short stories about the Southland Irish Catholic community and for his war history and novels, but Not here, not now is also well worth a read. An earlier Davin novel, Cliffs of fall, is also partly set at the University of Otago (and is still on my growing ‘waiting to be read’ list). Davin himself studied classics at Otago, went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, served with distinction in World War II, and had a long career in publishing with Oxford University Press.

A poor scholar by C.R. Allen, published in 1936, is another novel about a working class boy who gains a Rhodes Scholarship. It charts the progress of the hero, Ponto, from his kindergarten days to Oxford, with a couple of brief chapters devoted to his time at the University of Otago: lectures, football, capping and dances all feature. The novel is set in the 1900s and 1910s, and brilliantly evokes the streets and landscapes of north Dunedin prior to World War I. Though Allen had been blind since the 1910s, he knew this environment well: he lived with his family at Arana – later to become a university residential college – and studied for the Anglican priesthood at Selwyn College. Unsurprisingly, All Saints Church also looms large in the book.

Another intriguing 1930s novel is The wind and the rain, by Otago medical graduate Merton Hodge. This was adapted by Hodge from his hit play of the same name, which had an impressive three-year run on the London stage. Film versions came out in 1938 and 1959, the latter starring Alan Bates. It is a story of a group of medical students sharing lodgings and, though the setting is Edinburgh, Hodge’s colourful characters were, according to a 1930s newspaper, “moulded on personalities he met while at Otago University, one of them being a well-known doctor at present practising in the South.” If you know who that might be, I’d love to hear from you!

Can you identify any more of the students in the photograph? Do you know of any other novels with University of Otago settings which I can add to my reading pile? If so, please get in touch. Then there are the poems and films …. I’ll save those for future posts!