Theatre review

MERCURY TWO

Tomorrow Will Be A Lovely Day by Craig Harrison

Reviewed by ROBERT H. LEEK

One wonders to what extent Mervyn Thompson's proposal to stage this play - and the Mercury's acceptance of the idea - were acts of mutual defiance. Whatever the case, both theatre and director have emerged with enhanced mana, and Mr Harrison has good reason to be pleased: his work has been done more than justice.

Tomorrow Will Be a Lovely Day doesn't stand up to close scrutiny as a piece of drama - if put alongside, say, Christopher Hampton's Savages, which failed so sadly at the same theatre a couple of years ago. The comparison is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Both plays employ an episodic-documentary structure held together by a narrator, explore radical, liberal and reactionary attitudes towards a racial minority in a crisis situation, and rely on a mixture of wit, satire and emotion, often framed in extended anecdotal monologues. The problem with Tomorrow is that its credibility doesn't outlast its running time. Our political leaders may be numbskulls: but I doubt if we'd entrust the running of a bowling club to Harrison's cabinet. The liberal Pakeha family's encounter with the young intellectual Maori has been sketched in with the delicacy of a Bromhead cartoon. The CIA man comes straight out of a bad 1930s gangster film; and the poor Maoris have been equipped with some embarrassingly patronizing dialogue. The best writing is reserved for the narrator (although that too is, at times, unduly pedantic, and its best bit comes out of the Book of Revelations -you can't go wrong with the Bible!) and for the military: the demonstration of a do-it-yourself torture kit by a Viet Nam veteran is a gem.

Structurally, the play works along a peculiar 'arc' - getting to its dramatic climax halfway, and then following a down-beat track to a rather laconic end. All this is a pity, for even if no longer original, the central idea is thought- provoking and dramatically viable: how would our slack-muscled nation react to a Polynesian attempt at revolution, no matter how abortive? What form could a revolt take, and what might it lead to - concentration-camps, a colonels' regime, a CIA takeover? If he had handled his play with a little more finesse, and a little more respect for his characters and for his audience's intelligence, Harrison might have presented us with an alarmingly credible piece of speculation. As the play stands, we're let off the hook and can relax with a slightly uneasy giggle the moment the curtain drops.

The great merit of Mervyn Thompson's staging lay in its economy; the use, for instance, of a simple device to serve both continuity and plausability: a couple of TV sets, Philip Sherry reading the news, and a mock-up of the kind of stills and documentary footage we see on the box every day. Wisely, no attempts were made at shading down the grossest caricatures into 'real people'. Instead, they were, on occasion very successfully, exploited in their own rights - notably in the instances of Robert Shannon's sleazy CIA agent and David Weatherley's cameo as the military torture expert. The combined talents of Helen Dorward, Arthur Wright and Warwick Slyfield could not salvage the Pakeha couple and the Prime Minister: but Slyfield made a quite credible ruling Lieutenant-General. Cliff Wallace went a long way to overcome the problems of some very purple writing and an, at close range, undisguisable Pakeha physiognomy, in his portrayal of the young Maori student, with some very spirited acting. As the guerilla leader, Grant MacFarland did as fine a job as the material allowed for; Don Selwyn, after a visibly embarrassed start in the role of the moderate Wetere, was superb and profoundly moving as Wetere's father confronted with the revolutionary - and the news of his son's death. One of the sustaining strengths of the production, however, was Karl Bradley's slyly ironic narrator.

Perhaps the experiment has been sufficiently successful for the Mercury to become somewhat more enterprising with regard to local writing than it has been to date; for Mervyn Thompson's undoubted talents to be employed there again; and for Craig Harrison to go on writing - hopefully better - plays.