A play of substance will keep you talking as you leave the theatre and make you think, says Louise Petherbridge.
She is enthusiastic about her next project, directing the world premiere of Renee's new play, Shall We Gather at the River, which opens at the Globe Theatre on October 8 as part of the Otago Festival of the Arts.
Renee's plays are rewarding because they are of substance, because they are about how lives have been hard, she says.
"I'm sure life has not been easy for Renee, and we get a view of that which is from the heart."
Renee, now in her 80s and living near Wellington, left school and started work at the age of 12.
She worked in woollen mills, a printing factory, a grocery-dairy and later as a writer and teacher of creative writing.
She completed a BA at the University of Auckland in 1979, in 1989 was Burns Fellow at Otago University and around the same time was also artistic director at the Globe Theatre.
Renee's best-known plays are a historical trilogy about four generations of working-class women, Wednesday to Come, Pass it on and Jeannie Once.
Shall We Gather at the River is also about people whose lives have been hard and who have suffered trauma, but it's also about reconciliation and learning about love.
The title comes from an old gospel song, and several gospel songs are heard in the play, she says.
"The people in it seem to learn that they have more affection for the people they are at war with than they thought they had," she said.
"Life has not been easy for any of the characters and we see the effects of this in their relationships. Though they are not really conscious of it, they come to this little cottage high up in the thick bush with a wild river running down below."
Rusa, one of the characters, left her husband, and with her lover and son came to live in this cottage, but both her lover and son drowned in the flooded river.
Hearing of her sadness, her estranged step-sister, Grace, makes the trek up the dangerous path to see her.
Grace's trauma was a result of being held hostage while working overseas as a nurse.
She goes up the dangerous track with Rusa's ex-husband, who is planning to have the cottage demolished.
Also, there is a contractor hired to pull down the cottage, who happens to be a former boyfriend of one of the sisters.
But there's also a strange dimension to the play.
"We kind of see into their minds and every now and then this other dimension swirls round them rather like a mist.
"It's the time of Beltane, which is the Celtic season when the spirits can move between this world and the next. People light fires to guide the spirits, so it has this other strange dimension of a parallel world that surrounds them like an aura."
The characters have to learn compromise and compassion, face the death of others and deal with human cruelty, but they find they have the resources to do something about it themselves, she says.
See it
The world premiere of Shall We Gather at the River by Renee, directed by Louise Petherbridge, opens at the Globe Theatre on October 8 and plays until October 17.
It features Terry MacTavish, Glenys Whittington, William Needs and Andrew Cook.
