Back where it all began

By Rebecca Fox

Peter Hayden has unfinished business with Roger Hall’s plays. So the Dunedin actor is staging End of Summertime in Dunedin, he tells Rebecca Fox.

Dunedin's former Fortune Theatre used to be the go-to venue for a debut of a Roger Hall play.

Thirteen of the top 20 most popular plays ever presented by the Fortune Theatre were written by Hall, Four Flat Whites in Italy and The Share Club coming in at first and second.

These days, with the Fortune long closed, a new Hall play does not often even come to the city.

Hayden, a veteran of stage and screen, says, surprisingly, he had not done many Hall plays until Winding Up at Circa Theatre in 2021.

‘‘We just got going and it booked out and Covid came and we went into lockdown and so we never finished it.’’

Peter Hayden plays Dickie, a retired cow cocky adjusting to life in Auckland, in Roger Hall’s End of Summertime. PHOTOS: SUPPLIED

Having really enjoyed what he did get to do on that play, when he saw that Hall’s End of Summertime had been performed in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, but not Dunedin, he saw an opportunity to bring it south.

He got in touch with some ‘‘ex-Fortune’’ types, such as producer Karen Elliot, who was keen, and Peter King (designer), Stephen Kilroy (technical) and Clare Adams signed on too.

‘‘With Roger having had a lot of debuts here, we thought, well we can’t do that, but at least let’s do it. His shows always went gangbusters down here.’’

However, End of Summertime does have its origins in Dunedin.

Hall chose the Fortune for the debut of C’mon Black, introducing cow cocky and rugby fanatic, Dickie Hart and his South African trip to the 1995 Rugby World Cup, to audiences.

Peter Hayden as Dr Almassy, in South Pacific horror film A Whyte Christmas.

The play was a hit and went on to tour New Zealand to sell-out crowds, as did You Gotta Be Joking, Dickie’s next adventure when he and wife Glenda retired to town.

Thirty years later, his latest story is coming to Dunedin, End of Summertime playing at Te Whare o Rukutia, in Princes St. This time Dickie and Glenda have moved to Auckland to be nearer the grandchildren.

Dickie is a character that Hayden, a former Natural History New Zealand presenter, can identify with.

Hayden has always loved the rural life, spending as much time as he could on his uncle’s farm growing up, even deciding to be a vet.

While becoming a vet did not eventuate, he has spent plenty of time on farms over the years and married a farm girl from Southland.

‘‘I know the rural life. I know that type and it’s straight shooters. Some can be conservative too.’’

He sees that in Dickie, who went from school to the milking shed at 15, but paired with a curiosity about life that could have seen him go far in other circumstances.

Now coming to terms with apartment living in Auckland, Dickie struggles with finding something to do with his time, making friends and the traffic.

‘‘So, he’s spent all his time on the land and the outdoors and then he’s stuck in a crowd. There’s always people. There’s always noise. There’s always stuff. And he just doesn’t take it at all, initially.’’

It is classic Hall territory, being able to tell a story many people can relate to.

‘‘He knows the buttons to push. Any current issue, any little foible, any strange thing about we as New Zealanders, he’ll pick up on it.’’

Hayden also believes there is increasingly more of Hall’s life reflected in his works, as both Dickie and Hall live in apartments on the North Shore.

‘‘So he’s drawing from very intimate knowledge of that. And he won’t mind me saying this, but he’s like a magpie, you know, bright, shiny, humorous objects he’ll pick up.’’

Peter Hayden, pictured here with Margaret Campbell in the nature series for children, Wildtrack, was a presenter for Natural History New Zealand for four decades.

Hayden himself moved to Auckland for a few years after he finished 40 years at NHNZ and decided to pick up his acting career again.

He has always seen himself as a storyteller, whatever the genre.

‘‘But I don’t mind whether it’s non-fiction, doing documentary or drama. So, I largely put drama aside all those years. I’d do a play, at the Fortune, if I could find the time but it wasn’t often.’’

So, he has some empathy for Dickie. It also allows him to exercise his comedy muscles.

‘‘I like this form. Because he’s just telling the story of his time in Auckland. And it’s just him and the audience and that’s quite special in a performing sense.’’

As a result, they have specifically chosen small venues of no more than 150 seats in which to stage the show.

Peter Hayden, playing a grandparent in another Roger Hall play, You Can Always Hand them Back, with Darien Takle in 2016.

It is only the second time Hayden has done a solo show. The first was Tom Scott’s play about his father, The Daylight Atheist.

‘‘I did that in the basement of The Fortune, the downstairs theatre. And that was perfect. And I don’t think it was just because of the play. The play was bloody good. It was because of that, they were intimately connected with the story.’’

Solo can have its challenges, such as the danger of being distracted by someone in the audience, but it is worth it for the enjoyment both sides get, he says.

Being older — he is in his late 70s — Hayden is aware of looking after himself, getting plenty of sleep and not drinking during the week to deal with the rigours of performing.

Remembering the script is not a problem, probably due to starting ‘‘plenty’’ early to learn his lines, he says.

‘‘People always ask, ‘how do you learn all those lines?’ Well, you learn the story and then you gradually get more accurate in the lines within the story. I could never just learn it rote. You have to be able to structure it.’’

Hayden, who lives on 22ha at Portobello, fits his acting life — which most recently includes a new South Pacific horror movie, A Whyte Christmas, where he gets scalped by a rogue Keisha Castle-Hughes, and a detective drama set in Queenstown, A Remarkable Place To Die — around his other passion, plants.

He has created another persona, Leafy Pete, who takes visitors on forest walks.

‘‘I love that too, because that’s storytelling. And I just get so much joy out of inspiring people about trees, in particular, plants.’’

His interest and knowledge of botany has been a slow burn — his earlier work with NHNZ never really focused on plants — but recent research uncovering plants’ ‘‘intelligence or agency’’ fascinates him.

‘‘It’s only since living in regenerating bush, living among plants for the past 10 years and gradually getting to understand, coinciding with recent publication of new research and it’s all come together.’’