Darien Takle's Portrait of Frances Hodgkins

WILLIAM DART

Darien Takle is a young actress who has made a considerable impact on the Auckland theatre scene since she made her professional debut with the Mercury Theatre in 1973. From being one of a quartet of performers playing the Jacques Brel is alive and well theatre piece in the sedate environs of the City Art Gallery (as well as the somewhat sweatier venue of the Easter Show), she went on to spend several years working in Great Britain: coming back to present her own one woman programme of Brecht/Weill songs, in addition to creating the title role in Pam Gemms's Piaf at Theatre Corporate last year.

Herself a playwright, Takle has been steadily compiling another solo theatre piece based on the life and career of New Zealand's great expatriate, Frances Hodgkins.

The subject matter had attracted this actress over a number of years. There had been the exposure to the paintings themselves during her own University years; and the impact of the E. H. McCormick study, The Expatriate. But once the idea conceptualised, there was the task of gathering together material and ordering it into a viable dramatic format. At first Dr McCormick approached her with some letters and documents; and, after she arrived in England, the painter's nephew gave her access to the very considerable archive of letters and notes - all of which not only provided a chronology of Hodgkins's career but also put the painter's own personality more into focus.

Takle is able to present a portrait of Hodgkins from the age of thirty through to her final years in England. Lt was quite a task to capture the strength of a character who so bravely left the quiet city of Dunedin to pursue a career as a painter over on the other side of the world in Europe. For, apart from a single visit seven years after she initially left for Europe, Hodgkins was never to live in New Zealand again.

Takle's work stresses the impact of the two wars on Hodgkins. These occurred at the most inopportune times: just as it seemed the painter's career was finally starting to crystallise. (It may be that the struggle of the artist towards success and recognition is not dissimilar to that of an actor. just as the painter will visit a succession of dealers trying to bring off the exhibition that will secure a reputation, the actor must visit a similar round of agents trying to find the role that will lead to better things.) And as a minor parallel to the way that the Wars provided interruptions to Hodgkins's career, union unrest and strikes in Auckland theatres in September proved unsettling for Takle just as she was on the point of staging her Hodgkins theatre-piece.

There are other closer parallels between the two artists: an amusing one arises from those 'painting evenings' in Dunedin that Hodgkins describes in her letters. Takle was to experience similar evenings many decades later in the same city when, as a child, she would go with her mother to paint, model, and above all look forward to the well-appointed supper.

However the affinity Takle feels for Hodgkins is stronger than such superficial parallels as this. In places, she has had to put herself as a woman and an artist into the personality of the painter, so as to assess her subject's reactions to such events as her broken engagement: or to evoke the final ten years of Hodgkins's life - covered by relatively few letters.

Photograph by
Marti Friedlander

Takle's whole career as an actress has developed in the perspective of her background in the visual arts. The actress remembers her early days at Elam, majoring in sculpture, and organising a 'sculptural event' with an actor moving amongst various objects against an interplay of various projected slides. She remembers being told her work was more relevant to the dramatic arts than the sculptural.

As a result of all this, drama has become a very visual art for Takle. From her time in London, she remembers above all a promenade performance of Hamlet at the Half Moon Theatre, with Frances De La Tour in the title role. This was an exciting and lively experience: with the audience packed into the theatre space, and action likely to burst forth from any area.

What of Takle's plans for the future? With all her Elam contemporaries now exhibiting, she is herself being drawn back into the visual arts. Victoria Edwards's new pieces from etching cloths excite her. She could visualise these as a striking feature of a play yet to be written. And there might be a performance of the Brecht/Weill Seven Deadly Sins in collaboration with the Limbs Dance Troupe - a possibility as fascinating as it would be enterprising. Above all, there is her own tribute to the lady who remains New Zealand's most considerable painter.