beating time^[1]

Auckland, a budding dramadevotee and political activist, whose achievements over theensuing 50 years would contribute to an exceptional career as an academic, dramaturge and poet. Murray clearly has skin in the game. The loosely-linked progression of ten chapters, together with the Preface and an appended Finale (a symbolic photograph of ‘the statue of Sir George Grey in Albert Park, beheaded, Waitangi Day, 1987), is purposefully dramatic. And the role that Murray performs lies somewhere between a Greek chorus and The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway, part protagonist part confidante. Clearly, this is the story of what has affected him quite profoundly and is part of the legacy he is at pains to see left in good care. Needless to say, the points of intersection between the personal and institutional culture are complex and permeate the entire narrative. While carefully chosen individual ‘protagonists’ populate each chapter, grouped in three Parts, the dramatic structure of the book falls more neatly into two halves. The first half is a kind of ramp-up depicting unconventional personalities and events that have their origins elsewhere, predominantly the UK or in a discounted Māori culture, in the lead up to 1960. The ramp-down picks up urgency in an increasingly homegrown manner and depicts younger, more activist approaches to achieving radical change. Here’s the intermission point, circa 1965:

In writing this book I have met with a tension between transformational moments, times that seem to create a pause in time, when the world ‘turns’ – Carmen walks out of court a free woman, Barbara Hepworth becomes the talk of the town, Samuel Beckett hits the headlines, The Young Aucklanders in the Arts Festival actually takes place – and that other thing, the flow of time, its gradual imperceptible waxing and waning. The moon, we are told, is only full for a few seconds in each monthly cycle… Music has this quality of temporal tension, between what we call the melodic and rhythmic, that flow in time versus the harmonic and simultaneous, those moments when everyone sings the same chord and steps off on the same foot – and the song and dance begins – or ends (Ch 6, 195).

The push-and-pull is between a stopping dead and the oscillating, cumulative flow of time and the changes it occasions. The process can be quite brutal. Our characters, a couple of whom are mentioned above, constitute its heroes and villains. As Murray aptly puts it, ‘The motley crew who person the ship that sails through this book… don’t make a coherent group, they are not bound by a single idea and they weren’t working together’ (xv). The ‘crew’ is indeed ‘motely’, seeming almost ill-prepared for the part they must play under the spotlight, including several who have little more than walk-on parts (Wystan Curnow, Baxter, Pearson, Stead, Ashton-Warner, Adcock, Mayor Robbie, Brunton and Red Mole, Living Theatre Troupe, Keith Holyoake, Tim Shadbolt).

Those given prominence are as interesting in their own terms as they are in terms of their contribution to Murray’s argument (about which more shortly). Here we have an assortment mostly of oddballs, usually in combo, that take the stage. There are no solo performances or soliloquys – chapters involve two, three or four key individuals, with the occasional crowd scene thrown in for good measure (see ‘Festival Bombshell Needed’ and ‘The Auckland Bombings’, Ch 6, 10). This increases dramatic tension and the atmosphere of motley unpremeditatedness that Murray evokes. He parades his characters, within and across chapters, sometimes highlighting similarities (Lowry/Awatere, Ch 1; Hoffmann/Carmen, Ch 2-3; Macalister/Hepworth/Watson, Ch 3-5-8: ‘quiet subversives’); sometimes comparing and contrasting (Barker/Tomory, Ch 4-5: ‘overseas expert[s]’; Sargeson, Frame, Duggan, Watson, Ch 8); sometimes emphasising implicit or explicit conflict or hostility (Hepworth/Pearce, Ch 5: ‘side-stepped the plodding Pearse to score under the posts’; Crump/Watson, Ch 8); with a final denouement given to the mob (Ch 10).

Actually, Murray deftly weaves other layers of significance through the same narrative structure. Three of these layers stand out. One is the way recurrent motifs – Frame’s ‘lawnmower always wins’ and ‘terrible screaming called silence’, Tuwhare’s prescient ‘clear headed analysis of [his] society’, and Curnow’s ‘The Overseas Expert’ – underscore the theme of near-futile opposition to an entrenched social conformism. Similarly, key figures – flawed heroes like Awatere (‘the weight [he] carried was intolerable’), and Hoffman/Carmen, are approvingly and recurrently alluded to. The third way approval and disapproval are meted out is stylistic. The career trajectory of the ill-fated Barker, brought to NZ in 1958 to develop Community Arts Service (CAS) Theatre, is sympathetically contoured: a ‘flamboyant, eccentric and demonstrative’ (101) UK-trained professional, who, in his experience of New Zealand society, ‘sensed the horror beneath the surface’ (107), only to be eventually sacked by the University Council in 1962 because ‘Ronnie Barker had ended his usefulness’ (131). Together with his more successful alter ego, Peter Tomory, Director of Auckland Art Gallery 1956-64, who modernised (again, not without opposition) the gallery’s acquisitions and curatorial management, Barker shares the ‘missions of transformation’ applause. Not without some justification, valuative reassessments of creative artists is also in reasonably plain view. Author of A Good Keen Man Barry Crump and Baxter – who ‘chose to don the martyr’s sackcloth’ – are disparaged because they ‘performed acts of cultural contortionism… as professional rebels’; while Crump’s lover and fellow writer, Jean Watson, whose ‘female pov’ ‘short sweet simple love story’ Stand in the Rain is admiringly and half-coyly awarded ‘the Great New Zealand Novel’ badge of honour (253-54). Her ‘To chance and circumstance’ dedication endears itself to Murray. In contrast to charlatans Baxter and Crump, Watson Frame and Tuwhare (who contributes the book’s title) are regarded as the decade’s genuine literary stars. Even Sargeson, whose The Hangover (1967) is rightfully celebrated as epochal, has the achievement downgraded because in real life ‘his celebrity was based on a cloak of secrecy’. At its heart, Song and Dance is dedicated to the artistic dimension of social activism and it fits this bill with aplomb.

It is also assiduously researched. Pages of historical investigation background Council shenanigans around CAS, Auckland Festival organisation, Auckland Art Gallery governance; television; the founding of the Auckland International Film Festival (credited to Horrocks and Colgan, additional ‘quiet subversives’); rapid demographic changes and increased availability of education; and the advent of student and worker anti-war and anti-racism protests (thanks largely to the activism spearheaded by the likes of Tim Shadbolt, Ngā Tamatoa, PYM, HALT and CARE). Yet it is not primarily a book of historiography or scholarship. Research provides the choreographical ballast for a deeper purpose, which is the recovery and re-enactment of an originary impulse to act out, of sustained creative revolt. The ‘transformational moments’ enacted by Murray’s cast outperform the extensions of time they necessarily occur within. Beyond the obvious predicament of individual unbelonging, this raises the broader issue of historical revisionism. Such revisionism is pro-radical and pro-youth; pro-education and pro-artistic endeavour; pro-Māori and pro-feminist. It is anti-status quo and anti-establishment; anti-neoliberal and anti-capitalist; anti-apartheid and anti-war. In a curious way, it is also anti-cerebral, preferring plastic and embodied artforms (including those of Anna Hoffman and Carmen: ‘flamboyance was a woman’s right’) to speculative thought. In brief, the dramatis personae are enterprising, iconoclastic, self-determining, unmistakably ‘entangled with personal catastrophe’. ‘The point was simply to rebel’ (66).

More than a treatise that trusts in social transformation, or inclines towards a dint of transcendentalism (a reason perhaps why only minor appearances are granted people like Stead, Dudding, McCahon, Smithyman, Baxter, Duggan, despite their own considerable self-transformations during the 1960s), the focus is on a present unfitting. It concerns disaffection and restlessness and the elusivity of intended outcomes in an ‘anarchic amoral world’ (a phrase used in reference to Watson’s novel). Perhaps this is the reason why in his subtitle Murray opts for the word ‘Revolt’ in preference to ‘Revolution’ (the name of a track on the next Beatles’ White Album, 1968):

The difference between revolt and revolution is that the former has no clear objectives or way of persuasion. However, the latter is executed via a pre-planned path which includes thoroughly justified objectives, as well as policies. <https://justcredible.com/what-is-the-difference-between-revolt-and-revolution&gt;

Instead of amelioration or reconciliation promised through ‘progress’, the prevailing atmosphere is an abiding ‘Theatre of Cruelty’. The phrase is Artaud’s, that iconoclastic hedonist ‘madman junkie’ and French ‘tortured crazy man’ originator of The Theatre and Its Double, thrown in the mix: ‘Artaud would be king’ (265). Revolt without regard to outcomes – is that the ideal, the book’s leitmotif?

With this I come to a summation that also serves as an open verdict. While unquestionably presented as a celebration – witness Song and Dance and the Figures in Light No. 5 portrait by Pat Hanly that grace the rainbow-like cover – the overall enterprise at the end leaves me with feelings that are strangely conflicted. This is not intended as a complaint – after all, the feeling of perplexity is one that seems to be invited. Despite the undoubted verve, nobility and sheer ballsiness, many of Murray’s protagonists’ endeavours – not to speak of their personal lives – end in degrees of compromise, setback or tragedy. Even the one-hit wonders, The Bluestars, forfeit international acclaim on gaining it, leaving only these lyrics:

                    I’ve been labelled an angry young man
                    Because I don’t fit in the master plan
                    Under society’s microscope
                    I look funny but it’s no joke.
                                        (‘Social End Product’, 1966)

Are we back in the days of Pearson’s ‘Fretful Sleepers’ – with a ‘60s twist? Then, as nowadays, it seems that ill-gotten rewards invariably arrive at the doorstep of institutional conformists while we other – ill-begotten, ostracised, creative souls – invariably suffer underestimation, deprivation, exclusion. The takeaway impression is of a bifurcated world – moments of illuminating breakthrough bounded by preponderant others of disappointment, withdrawal, non-cohesion. Does revolt intimate a failed revolution or does it simply indicate the way innovation and unusualness in New Zealand are constantly driven underground, or just away? Cultural innovation has thus far proved to be a rather painful journey and promises to continue so.

note

[1] Atuanui Press: Pokeno, 2021, 360 pages. I commend Diane Lowther in contributing a comprehensive index, a handy resource in the writing of this brief essay, which first appeared in Poetry New Zealand Yearbook ,2022.