by Tom Scott
KEITH: Any issues you’d like the group to address?
SIMON: No.
HARRY grins knowingly—
HARRY: Don’t be shy.
SIMON flashes HARRY a dirty look.
HARRY (cont’d): We may tell other people, but only in strictest confidence.
ERROL: Nothing, but fucking nothing, goes outside this room!
HARRY: There you go.
KEITH: Perhaps you could introduce yourself at this point, Harry?
HARRY: Harry Ronayne. Journalist. To be honest, I’m only here because my wife insisted I come.
ERROL: Good for her!
HARRY: I really wanted to go to assertiveness training but Joanne wouldn’t let me.
Some of the men smile.
KEITH leans forward earnestly—
KEITH: What exactly are you trying to hide, Harry? Maybe it’s time you dropped your guard and got in touch with your feminine side.
HARRY: Trust me on this, Keith. If I had a feminine side, I’d be touching it all the time.
ERROL explodes in anger—
ERROL: If you think this is one huge piss-take you can fuck off right now.
KEITH is alarmed at ERROL’s vehemence.
KEITH: Ah, Errol. Perhaps you could come in at this juncture?
ERROL: No sweat. I’m Errol the fireman. I left school at fifteen. I’ve got one little nipper, Tracy, who is sleeping like a log in Keith’s bed. Thanks, Keith.
KEITH smiles wanly.
ERROL (cont’d): I’m here because I used to thump the missus. Every time she questioned my authority I freaked out and decked her. Put her in hospital twice. I’m not proud of meself. Why are we men like this?
KEITH is unhappy with the tenor of ERROL’s introduction.
KEITH: It is certainly our intention to devote a number of future sessions to power and control issues.
ERROL smacks his fist angrily into his other palm—
ERROL: We’ve got to learn to express our anger without using our fists. And why are we so fucking angry in the first place?
KEITH: Quite.
After this scene was shot the German actor Thomas Kretschmann came up to me at the craft services table in the garage of the large house we were filming in and said that Mike was the best actor of all of them. Better than him, better than Joel Edgerton, and better than Les Hill—and they were professionals who had been doing it for years, and this was Mike’s first acting role. He was just as stunning playing a cop in Rage, the telemovie about the 1981 Springbok tour that I co-wrote with Averil’s brother Grant. I wanted Mike to play Hillary in my TVNZ drama series of the same name, broadcast in 2016, but for reasons I still can’t fathom the producer and the director went behind my back to replace him with another actor. That actor did a fine job, it has to be said, but Mike would have been spellbindingly good.
Thomas Kretschmann was being too hard on himself. He was brilliant playing the lecherous Klaas. After one particularly tense scene, where his wife, played by Rhona Mitra, confronts him about his infidelity, the crew burst into spontaneous applause. The director, Paul Middleditch, ran forward shouting and clapping his hands. ‘Wonderful acting guys. Wonderful!’
‘Fuck off!’ said Thomas, who was going through marital woes of his own in real life, ‘It’s wonderful writing. Tommy, come in here and take a bow, man!’ I left the monitor and walked out onto the set, where he shook my hand.
INT. KATRIEN’S LOUNGE—NIGHT
KLAAS’s paintings of Amsterdam line the walls. KATRIEN’s cello sits in one corner. KATRIEN is curled up on a roll-back couch in front of an exposed brick fireplace. KLAAS holds a photo of their wedding and attempts light conversation—
KLAAS: Your mother was so shitty about the paint on my hands, remember? I bet she never hung up that painting.
KATRIEN: What is it you want, Klaas?
KLAAS: Have you told the girls about Kimberly?
KATRIEN: Kimberly? How charming. Of course not. Give me some credit. I said mummy and daddy were arguing a lot and needed some time apart.
KLAAS gets tearful.
KLAAS: I behaved very badly, Kati, I know that. I’m very sorry.
KATRIEN: Yeah, sure.
KLAAS: I didn’t want this to happen.
KATRIEN (acid): It’s my fault, I should never have held that gun to your head and forced you to fuck that girl.
KLAAS: Please, Kati. I don’t want us to break up.
KATRIEN: How could I ever trust you again?
KLAAS: She meant nothing to me, Kati, nothing!
KATRIEN: But you fucked her!
KLAAS shrugs.
KLAAS: It didn’t mean anything.
KATRIEN: You don’t understand, do you? Sex is something very special and beautiful.
KLAAS (bitter): If sex is that fucking important how come we never had any?
KATRIEN has no answer—
When it came out in 2009, Separation City got a pummelling from a lot of New Zealand film critics. Peter Jackson saw it differently. He said it was the kind of film New Zealand should be making and was effusive about my handling of ensemble dialogue.
Evan Williams, the film critic for The Australian, wrote that Separation City was the screenplay Edward Albee might have written as a sequel to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, had he been raised in the suburbs of Auckland. He said the best moments of the film had an energy and exuberance worthy of Billy Wilder and some of the gags were of Woody Allen standard.
Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby also got a towelling when it was broadcast late at night by TVNZ. Some critics said it was the worst comedy ever made in New Zealand. But in Australia it was a big hit for the ABC, which repeated both series several times. My daughter Rosie, who was studying architecture in Melbourne at the time, excitedly reported back to me that fellow students were spouting Gormsby monologues at parties. When Australian sports fans descended on the capital for a sevens tournament that year, they cleaned out all the stores of Gormsby DVDs. Dozens of blogs were set up in Australia devoted to Gormsby, the tone almost universally one of admiring disbelief. ‘Why can’t we do this?’ they asked.
Gormsby also garnered good reviews in the Australian press. ‘Enough to make me laugh shamelessly,’ said the Sydney Morning Herald; ‘Not since Father Ted has there been a television series so willing to trample on every kind of sensibility and so triumphantly gets away with it,’ said The Age; ‘A devastatingly witty spoof of the New Zealand education system,’ said The Courier-Mail.
I was in the Rumdoodle bar in Kathmandu, having just finished the sad task of filming and assembling a tribute documentary on Sir Edmund Hillary to be aired when he died, which was looking to be very soon, when a tall teenager sidled up to me. His English-born mum and Tibetan-born dad lived in Kathmandu, but he had just finished his high-school education at Geelong Grammar, just out of Melbourne. In the boarding school they compiled a top-ten list of their favourite film and television comedies of all time. The usual suspects—Fawlty Towers, Monty Python, Blackadder, Seinfeld and Father Ted—were all on it. So was Gormsby.
The TVNZ staff and NZ On Air apparatchiks responsible for commissioning and funding Gormsby, on the other hand, were deeply ashamed of it, changed their names by deed poll, altered their features with plastic surgery and denied all involvement. Go figure.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THE DAYLIGHT ATHEIST
IN 1999, AS ONE OF the speakers at Sir Edmund Hillary’s eightieth-birthday bash at Government House in Wellington, I made the point that apart from the wild excitement of Ed’s and Tenzing’s conquest of Everest, life in New Zealand in the 1950s was stupefyingly dull. Exaggerating only slightly, I described the small Manawatū town I grew up in as being a place where you could fire a cannon down the main street at rush hour—and if you hit anyone you’d be doing them a favour. In Feilding life didn’t just pass you by—it crossed to the other side of the street when it saw you coming.
Afterwards one of the guests, New Zealand’s most successf
ul playwright, Roger Hall, came rushing up and said, ‘If you don’t write a play about your childhood, I will!’ When Roger talks like that you have to take him seriously. I went home and started work. Four weeks later, The Daylight Atheist was the result. I almost called it The Weeping Bowl, but that sounded too grim.
When asked how much of it is biographical I borrow a line from a surrealist painter who said that none of his pictures were real but all of them were true. If the play were a diamond necklace, then perhaps a third of the baubles would be real and the rest cut glass, but I have difficulty now telling the difference. Some things in the play did happen to me. Some things happened to other people. Some things could have happened to anyone. As a result, Danny Moffat resembled many fathers, including my own.
I started out with the intention of writing a play set across five countries and two hemispheres, requiring a cast of thousands. The stage would teem and swarm with characters like the concourse of Grand Central Station during rush hour and a bomb alert, but sitting at the keyboard my fingers refused to oblige. I wanted a story full of rush and clamour leading to the point where my father ends up alone in a room packed with junk, including four dead black-and-white television sets, a cockpit seat from a Harvard trainer and twin beds with threadbare burnt-orange candlewick bedspreads, getting his meals delivered on a tray. Then it occurred to me that it would be a lot simpler to set the play in that squalid room and let him tell us in his own words how he got there.
Having made that decision, the play almost wrote itself. In the process my father became Danny Moffat because the man on stage needed a childhood, and I knew virtually nothing about my father’s, apart from him growing up Protestant somewhere in Northern Ireland, that he had siblings and that he had for a time lived with a childless aunt.
It’s shocking really but I never knew and still don’t know the day, the month or the year of his birth.
When the play was almost written I contacted Simon Prast at the Auckland Theatre Company, who was very encouraging. Yes, they would love to read the first draft. It was clumsy in places, and raw. I could hear it in my head but would other readers hear it in theirs?
Averil was still in bed one Saturday morning when I dropped a printed copy on the duvet and fled. An hour later she came out puffy-eyed and hugged me. She said it was wonderful and she was very proud of me. I was chuffed but her response was sort of compulsory.
A week later, while researching a movie project in Central Otago, I got a call from Elena Azuola, Averil’s close friend and boss on Lord of the Rings, who before becoming a film accountant had been a dancer, an actress and personal assistant to Tennessee Williams.
‘This is some powerful, poignant, funny and distressing shit,’ said Elena in her confident, husky drawl. ‘Tennessee would be proud of this.’ I was elated, but again the response was sort of compulsory.
I was rescued by the kindness of strangers. Simon and his people liked it a lot, which wasn’t compulsory. In 2001 it was scheduled for a public reading as part of the Auckland Theatre Company’s Second Unit Programme. Stuart Devenie was selected to do the reading. Full of restless energy, angularity and intellect, Stuart seemingly absorbed the play by osmosis and spent much of our precious two days of rehearsal discoursing wittily and widely on all manner of matters, political and theatrical.
As the 7.30 deadline in a drab, low-ceilinged downtown hotel conference room approached, I started to panic quietly. One small notice had appeared in that morning’s New Zealand Herald. Optimistically, a hundred stackable chairs were placed in rows under garish fluorescent lighting. In the end over 150 people showed up to see Stuart perform without benefit of props, costume, music or make-up. I sat in the front row between Averil and Elena.
Stuart played Danny Moffat with a cold, cerebral fury and was brilliant. I was relieved to hear lots of shocked laughter and even more gratified when I heard sniffing and stifled sobs. Greg McGee was sitting beside my lovely baby brother, and he reported later that Rob sobbed softly pretty much throughout. Afterwards another friend, the actor/writer/director Ian Mune, accosted me.
‘You bastard! You bastard! I hated the prick right to the end, then you got me and I wept for him!’
Nothing I have done in cartooning, print journalism or television documentary-making has ever come close to the feedback I received for this small play. Strangers who were alcoholics or the children of alcoholics wrote to thank me for detailing Danny’s shortcomings and then forgiving him for them. Strangers with shameful secrets—an abortion long ago, an adoption forever regretted, a handicapped sibling they battled to accept, a schizophrenic parent who constantly embarrassed them or a child they were supposed to love but couldn’t—wrote to say it was cathartic having me lay bare my childhood and escape what could have been permanently wounding. For that I have to thank a saving shallowness. Even as my childhood was unfolding I was turning misery and embarrassment into anecdote. Any artistic licence lies not in the fevered imagination of my adulthood but in the fevered imagination of my youth. I rewrote history as it happened while it was still fresh and could be improved.
The reviews were universally rapturous.
One can’t help wonder at the pain endured to produce this wonderful play. Scott is our most gifted humourist. The hardest job in writing is to make people laugh and Scott pulls off the greatest trick and makes it look simple.
— GILBERT WONG, SUNDAY STAR-TIMES, 21 APRIL 2002
The sound of distant and ignored sobbing is a repeated image in Tom Scott’s remarkable first play. Don’t take it from this that The Daylight Atheist is a down-at-heel Angela’s Ashes clone. Far from it. Word wizard Scott infuses Dan’s story with rich humour. This is an excellent production of an outstanding play.
— LYNN FREEMAN, CAPITAL TIMES, 8 MAY 2002
One of the best New Zealand plays ever written. It is riddled with witty one-liners and yet it has humour that produces not only laughter but also tears. It sounds an enigma—a serious subject so engulfed in hilarious scenes but this is theatre at its zenith.
— M. WILLIAMSON, THE GUARDIAN, 10 OCTOBER 2002
Plays about the irascible charm of the bog Irish have become something of a theatrical cliché, but Moffat is a disturbing, complex creation who relates a monologue rivalling Joyce and O’Casey in linguistic virtuosity and bawdy humour.
— JOHN FORDE, SUNDAY STAR-TIMES, 20 APRIL 2003
If there is justice in the world it will be on Broadway or the West End. Go there. Borrow the airfare if you have to. Or steal it. You won’t regret it. It’s the best show you’ll see in years. At the end, as the one fancy lighting effect faded into black we applauded. Not polite end-of-a-play applause. It bruised the palms. Like all sincere applause it didn’t say bravo. It said thank you.
— JOE BENNETT, FESTIVAL DIARY, THE PRESS, WEDNESDAY, 23 JULY 2003
It got similarly rapturous reviews in Australia. My chum Murray Bramwell recommended it to another expat Kiwi, the artistic director of the Melbourne Theatre Company, Simon Phillips, who picked it up and wrote this in the theatre programme notes.
This is a brave, bold, blisteringly funny play from New Zealand which seems all the braver and bolder for being drawn from life. Tom Scott had a long, difficult relationship with his father and yet he allows neither the misty tear of sentiment nor of anger to cloud his view. He has written an amazingly complex character who is genuinely hilarious and tragic.
I defy anyone not to laugh and to weep for him, especially in the charismatic hands of Richard Piper. Richard has been delighting MTC audiences for many years. The Daylight Atheist offers him a magnificent tour-de-force and welcomes Peter Evans to the Company for his directorial debut.
I didn’t cry when my father died, but I admit I shed a few tears when I read some of the reviews.
It played to packed houses and went on to win a number of theatre awards. The Melbourne production travelled to Brisbane. The Sydney Theatre Company mounted a production of its own starring Max Cullen, which late
r travelled to Adelaide. I’m told that at that time it was the only New Zealand play ever performed as the main bill by the MTC and the STC.
As it happened the STC production was a nightmare. Max Cullen never got on top of the lines. Many nights the play finished anywhere between ten and twenty minutes early because large chunks of it escaped him. On the opening night, at the after-match function Max came up to me in tears to apologise for wrecking my play. It was New Year’s Eve. Fireworks on the Sydney Harbour Bridge behind us were ushering in 2005, champagne was flowing, I had beautiful Averil at my elbow, but instead of being elated I was biting my lip and consoling a distressed actor.
MY BROTHER MICHAEL DIDN’T GO to the play when it came to Palmerston North in a wonderful production starring Grant Tilly and directed by Danny Mulheron. I don’t blame him. It wasn’t about his father. His father was quite different from mine.
Besides, he wasn’t well. He was taken to Wellington Public Hospital in an ambulance when Palmerston North Hospital could do nothing to alleviate excruciating, disabling headaches. They suspected a brain aneurism. Plus his kidneys were failing him and he was put on peritoneal dialysis, a cumbersome, uncomfortable procedure, and his marriage to Jan crumbled. They sold the family home in Feilding. She moved to Rongotea, and Michael stayed permanently at the family bach at Waitarere Beach, where he cut a lonely figure walking the shore. I was shocked one visit when I joined him on the sands and he called a halt after 50 paces—he was that breathless—all the while insisting that he was fine. I remembered my father telling me once he could no longer walk to the dairy—it was too exhausting. Then Michael met the wonderful Annie, who literally took his breath away. Things got very hot and heavy very quickly.
Micky was admitted to Palmerston North Hospital after some dizzy spells. I drove Mum up to see him on a Friday. He was so in love he was more animated than I had seen him in years, laughing and joking. He told us that he had warned his cardiologist that if he wasn’t discharged for the weekend he would tie sheets together like they do in prison movies and abseil the three floors to freedom.