ROGER HALL

ABOUT THE AUTHOR - ROGER HALL

Roger Hall was born in Woodford Wells, Essex, England in 1939 and was educated at University College School, London. He emigrated to New Zealand in 1958 and, after periods spent working in insurance, restaurants and factories, graduated from Victoria University, Wellington, with an M.A. in English. He trained at Wellington Teachers' College, where he edited the college magazine, and subsequently worked as a primary school teacher before moving to the School Publications section of the Department of Education. There he edited Education magazine for several years before winning the Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago in 1977. He then taught the Playwriting course at Otago for fifteen years before moving to Auckland in the mid-1990s.

Hall began writing revue material while a student and then, with Joe Musaphia, wrote the pioneering local television comedy series, In View of the Circumstances. This was followed by scripts for Pukemanu and Buck House and by a number of one-off television plays. In 1976, following a visit to the United States where he observed at a playwrights' workshop, he wrote his first stage play, Glide Time, and became almost immediately this country's best-known and most commercially successful dramatist. In 1987 he was awarded both a QSO and the Turnovsky Award and in 1995 he received an honorary DLitt from Victoria University in recognition of his role in New Zealand theatre. He was the 1997 Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellow. In 2003 he was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services as a playwright. He also taught for a semester as visiting professor at Georgetown University's Centre for Australian and New Zealand Studies in Washington, D. C.

In addition to Glide Time (Fortune 1977 and 1978), his box office smashes are Middle Age Spread (Fortune 1978, 1979, 1982 and 2002), Prisoners of Mother England (Fortune 1980), Hot Water (Fortune 1983), The Share Club (Fortune 1987), After the Crash (Fortune 1988), Conjugal Rites (Fortune 1990 and 1992), By Degrees (Fortune 1993 and 1994), Social Climbers (Fortune 1995 and 1996), Market Forces (Fortune 1996),Take a Chance on Me (Fortune 2001), Taking Off (Fortune 2005), Spreading Out (Fortune 2005) and Who Wants To Be 100? (Fortune 2008).

For the musical theatre he wrote the books for the stage version of Footrot Flats (1983), Love off the Shelf (Fortune 1986, 1987 and 2004), The Hansard Show (Fortune 1989) and Dirty Weekends (Fortune 1997). He wrote the book and lyrics for Making it Big (Fortune 1991) and the linking narration for the revue of Philip Norman's songs, Where Would a Songwriter Be Without Love? (Fortune 1995).

Interspersing these popular pieces and his pantomimes, Cinderella (Fortune 1978, new version Fortune 2006), Robin Hood (1979), Aladdin (1980, new version Fortune 2007), Jack and the Beanstalk (2007) and Little Red Riding Hood (2008), are a number of darker, more personal works. These include State of the Play (Fortune 1979), Fifty Fifty (Fortune 1981), The Rose (Fortune 1981), The Quiz (1981), Multiple Choice (Fortune 1984), Dream of Sussex Downs (1986) and A Way of Life (2001). In 1989 he wrote a short play, You Must Be Crazy, to support the work of the Volunteer Service Abroad organisation. A one act play, Dynamite, was commissioned for Lunchtime Theatre at Allen Hall in 1996. To celebrate its 40th anniversary, Wellington's Downstage Theatre commissioned Foolish Acts which debuted there in September 2004. Last year he co-wrote with his daughter, Pip, Who Needs Sleep Anyway?, a piece commissioned to celebrate the centennial of the Plunket Society. It premiered at the Fortune and was then taken on tour throughout Otago and Southland.

Roger Hall has also written a number of works for solo performers - Mr Punch (Fortune 1989), C'Mon Black (Fortune 1996), The Book Club (Fortune 1999) and You Gotta Be Joking (1999).

Four of Hall's stage plays have inspired the popular television series Gliding On, Neighbourhood Watch, Conjugal Rites and Market Forces. In 2001 he was one of a trio of scriptwriters on the television satire series Spin Doctors. The BBC broadcast his radio play, The Dream Factory, in 1993. Bums on Seats, Hall's autobiography, was published in 1998 as was his textbook on playwriting, The Theatre Writer's Guide: Hot Tips for Good Scripts.

Hall's plays repeatedly touch on marriage, work, politics and education. Through them he has held a mirror up to the New Zealand middle class, reflecting the ways in which its mores, opinions and obsessions have changed (or not, as the case may be) in the course of the four decades since his arrival in this country.

Jack and the Beanstalk was premiered by Circa Theatre in Wellington in November last year. Writing of his love of the pantomime form at the time of the premiere of the revised version of Cinderella, Hall noted: "It's seemed sad to me for a long time that we have allowed the tradition of the Christmas pantomime to have almost died out in New Zealand. There are so few occasions when a visit to the theatre can be a family affair - and a pantomime is one of them. The humour nearly always appeals as much to the adults as the children." In Bums on Seats he recorded: "A Christchurch academic and theatre critic, Howard McNaughton, put in print that he thought it was a terrible waste of [the Burns Fellowship] to use it to write such lightweight material. It once again showed that there are grades of writing: writing humour is lower than writing serious material. Writing for children is downgraded similarly (how many writers for children have been awarded major fellowships?). So writing humour for children is, therefore, the lowest of the low. I considered a panto was a very worthwhile thing to write, and thought also that a lot of New Zealand theatre's problems were caused precisely by such snooty attitudes that McNaughton revealed."

Alister McDonald (Fortune Theatre Dramaturg)
(Mr McDonald has written two commentaries on Roger Hall's work. "Hall of Mirrors" appeared in Centrestage Australia, 2, 1 (September 1987) and "Hall Marks" was published in Playmarket News 12 (Autumn 1996).