Having a ball - again

Just up the road from the city, Middlemarch is planning its next singles ball, but it's women, not men, needing partners this year. Charmian Smith reports on the Globe Theatre's latest production.

Rehearsal of the Middlemarch Singles Ball: II at the Globe Theatre  this month with actors (from...
Rehearsal of the Middlemarch Singles Ball: II at the Globe Theatre this month with actors (from left) Leanne Byas as Phyllis, Elsa May as Penelope, Campbell Thomson as Pete and Dale Neill as Greg. Photo by Linda Robertson.
Karen Trebilcock feels she has found her niche writing rural stories.

''I think because I grew up in a city I came to the country with fresh eyes, because I wasn't brought up with it,'' the novelist and playwright who writes under the name Ella West says.

Her new play The Middlemarch Singles Ball: II, opens at the Globe Theatre on December 5, following the success of the first play during the Otago Festival of the Arts last year. The people at Middlemarch asked for another play about the biennial singles ball, she explains, and she enjoyed the exercise of taking characters from the first play and moving them on a year.

Trebilcock grew up in Invercargill, studied at the University of Otago then worked in Wellington and on the West Coast as a journalist. She married a West Coast farmer, and now they live and farm sheep on the Taieri.

Her relationship with Middlemarchians started when she was a journalist with the Taieri Herald and covered the community board meetings in Middlemarch every six weeks.

''I was amazed. You go to council or community board meetings here in Dunedin and they are not the most pleasant occasions. I won't go as far as to say they are stabbing each other in the back, but some of them are pretty nasty, especially council, but at Middlemarch, there was this group of people who just wanted to solve the problems and work together. That was amazing for me, as a journalist looking on.

''That's country people - they do work together. They have to. There's no-one else there. They bring along food and stop halfway through the meeting and have this meal and make you part of it. I really wanted to celebrate this community in the play.''

Karen Trebilcock
Karen Trebilcock
In the first play, The Middlemarch Singles Ball, the world-renowned ball (originally held to give young men working in the district a chance to meet women from outside) was in dire straits because all the local men had married and only women had bought tickets. The organisers solved the problem by bringing a group of Auckland men down and teaching them the basics of farming.

This year there are still no men needing wives, but there is a group of unhappy local women, as well as a new skifield to be opened, a legacy of the Aucklanders who introduced the notion of business diversity and new ventures to the community.

Trebilcock put her heart into the first play, but the locals enjoyed the second more, she says. Like the first play, it was staged in Middlemarch just before the ball.

''When you are farming you are dealing with life and death every day: your stock die, or lambs are born. All that big stuff happens during the day and maybe at night. They just don't want to see it all on stage. They want to relax and have a laugh. A city audience who might have sat in an office all day processing accounts might want to see life and death on stage. It will be interesting to see people's reactions,'' she said.

One of her new characters, Penelope, is an Aucklander. Since her husband Jack's death she is looking after the farm but often phones her father in Auckland.

''You get this lovely city meets country. He's asking if she has space in her fridge yet and she's trying to explain lambing - 'what's lambing?' 'It's birthing, Dad.'

''I'm a city person so it was nice to explore that side of it. Penelope raises lambs in spring. She has motherless lambs in her living room and bottle-feeds them, then four months later she's putting them on the truck to the freezing works to be killed: that idea that you are raising an animal to kill it is what farming's all about.''

Trebilcock finds plays rewarding, because she can watch the audience laugh at her jokes, whereas you don't get to see anyone reading a novel you have written, she says.

''When [the first play] was at the Globe I went four or five times with different people and audiences laughed at different jokes: it's like 'why do they laugh at this one and not that one?' There's one joke in this play that no-one laughed at in Middlemarch. It's about the wool cheque. You used to be able to buy a car with your wool cheque but now you are lucky if you can pay your shearers. I asked the people at Middlemarch why they didn't laugh and they said because it's not funny. I don't think town people will understand it because they won't understand how wool prices have swung so much,'' she said.

Ellie Swann, who is directing the Globe production, says Trebilcock has a clever wit but she doesn't laugh at country people, she laughs with them.

''She finds the comedy they would find funny and I think the fact that it's been so well-received in Middlemarch is quite key. They are real people and in no way the butt of the joke. It's more about relationships and the things that occur in a small town, the things you put up with and about dealing with changes on a personal level,'' Swann said.

Although a sequel, the play stands alone and it's not necessary to have seen the first one to enjoy the second, she explains.

Two of the original characters are back in this play: Phyllis, the driving force, the secretary who organises everything and has lived in the region since she was a child; and Greg, another local who ties everything together and is both philosophical and romantic.

At the end of the last play, Phyllis' husband ran off with the wife of Pete the publican. Pete was a fisherman who married a local girl who owned the pub, but he feels it's his duty to continue because the pub is important to the community and he couldn't let it go under with a lot of debt and let his ex-wife deal with it from wherever she was living now, Swann says.

Like Penelope, he's ''new'': they haven't lived there for 40 years, played for the local rugby team, or produced four sons for it.

The question arises of whether they should hold the ball again as they only scraped through last time. However, some people found the love of their life - even if they are now living in Auckland, and a Texan woman stole one of the local boys who was off to Texas in a month, she said.

''Pete turns around and says, 'well, we down at the pub do very well out of this ball, thank you'. Also his problem at the moment is there are a lot of single women in Middlemarch, through widowhood or divorce. They come in and sit at the bar and look miserable and have one drink, so his pub's going under. The shearing gang came in, took one look and left again but he managed to serve them outside. It takes a lot to scare a shearing gang. He's like, 'we need them to be happy'.''

The committee sets to, invites a BBC documentary crew, a fire crew from the United States, some Canadian Mounties, a male choir and some surf lifesavers from Bondi Beach.

Karen Trebilcock says she hopes she surprises a few people with what happens in the story. It's not what you might think.


See it
The Middlemarch Singles Ball: II by Ella West (Karen Trebilcock), directed by Ellie Swann, opens at the Globe Theatre, 104 London St, Dunedin on December 5. It features Dale Neill, Leanne Byas, Elsa May and Campbell Thomson.


 

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