Roger Hall gets nervous about the opening of a new play, despite having written more than 40, most of which have been popular and staged many times.
"It's a satisfaction but also quite terrifying. Brian Edwards once heard someone coming out of a play say 'Roger Hall never lets you down' - which is very nice, but I hope this is not the time when I let them down," he says.
"I'm never confident how anything will work. You just have to wait and see. They had a read-through of the first scene earlier this year when I was in Dunedin and the audience seemed to like it very much so that was encouraging."
Despite one production not working at Downstage some years ago, Hall has a good strike record. His agent tells him one of his plays opens somewhere in the world something like every 12 days. Many amateur groups are staging his plays these days. The Book Club, Conjugal Rights, and musicals Footrot Flats and Love Off the Shelf pop up every now and then, he says.
He's even had Middle Age Spread performed in London's West End. Three or four others have been considered for the West End, without quite getting to the stage.
"All things have to be lined up. The script is one thing, but then you have to have the right people. Conjugal Rights was going to go but then the desert war broke out and Americans stopped travelling so producers didn't take stuff to the West End that they might have. I know it sounds like an excuse but these things all affect the play's chances - the fact someone isn't available and all sorts of things."
His latest play, A Short Cut to Happiness, premieres at the Fortune Theatre, Dunedin, next Friday. It was originally scheduled to open at the Court Theatre in Christchurch in July but because of the earthquakes, will now open at the Court's new venue in the middle of December.
The idea for the play originated at a folk-dance session that Hall and his wife Diane sometimes attend.
"At one of those dances in a mixed round I said I feel a play coming on and this woman laughed at me and I laughed too, but at the end of the session I thought, there really is a play here."
Earlier, he'd seen a quote that said "there are shortcuts to happiness and dancing is one of them" that charmed him and he filed it away for future use.
"That's the easy bit. I thought about it for a while, then thought about Russian immigrants to New Zealand - there are quite a lot. Then I finally got around to having a Russian woman immigrant who teaches the class. That's the basis of the play."
It's about her and the dancing and the various people who come to the class and is set in a church hall where the class is held and in an apartment where they gather for coffee, he says.
"We see New Zealand through an immigrant's eyes. There are odd little comments there I hope will make us look at ourselves in a slightly different way. It's pretty mild social criticism compared to some but it's about the difficulties of some people who come here and have good qualifications and yet don't get the chance to use them."
Elena Stejko, herself a Russian immigrant, plays Natasha. She was one of the people Hall talked to during his research on how immigrants found life in New Zealand.
Hall finds dance music engaging and hopes the audiences will love it too and find themselves tapping their feet and thinking about taking up folk dancing too.
Hall has just returned from Sydney where a production of Four Flat Whites in Italy opened and toured to Canberra.
"The big breakthrough - well a minor breakthrough I suppose - was they didn't change the characters to Australians.
"Sandra Bates [the director] said it's a play about New Zealanders and that's what we'll do. It didn't diminish the audience's enjoyment of it at all."
Four Flat Whites in Italy, which played at the Fortune late last year, has done well everywhere, which took Hall by pleasurable surprise.
"You never know why. It's astonishing how many people have been to Italy. But it's not just about Italy, it's the stresses of travelling with other people and putting the characters under pressure and it's funny and it's sad," he says.
"I think one of my big strengths is the recognition factor. People still say 'that's us, we know what that's like', and audiences have grown up with me. I have a following but that's not to say younger people don't enjoy them.
"I seem to have a knack of doing topics people enjoy, plus I think I can write funny lines and people really do like to laugh.
"Other theatre people may shake their heads and look down on comedy, but if one can do it, it's very nice. And it's lovely to be in the audience when they are all laughing."
However, he doesn't get to see many productions of his plays these days.
"When you've seen them a few times you've seen them enough really. Sometimes I disappoint people by not going," he says.
Although he can no longer be bothered with the hoops writers have to go through to put a television idea forward, he has been turning out plays one after the other in the past few years.
"I'm running out of time," he says with a laugh.
Now 72, he was reminded by a friend in Sydney that four plays ago he said it was his last play. But plays seem to turn up in his head. He has one on grandparenting coming up, he says.
"It's to have songs written by [British singer-songwriter] Peter Skellern. I got to know him - he comes out every year and said he'd like to write songs for one of my plays. I had a look at one I'd had on the back burner for a while and thought that would be good. It's called You Can Always Hand Them Back. It's going to happen sometime next year."
He also has a pantomime in rehearsal in Wellington, an annual event for the past six or seven years.
"The trouble with pantomimes is they need servicing. Last week I had a request for some World Cup jokes and now they need election jokes. You can't just write them and let them stand alone. They need to be fixed each time," he says.
"I'm really thrilled Wellington has retaken up the panto tradition. The public know it's on and they take their kids and grandchildren. It's a very important thing, I think, to get kids in the theatre along with their parents. They see theatre is something they can enjoy because their parents enjoy it and they love the participation and the look-out-behind-you stuff."
• SEE IT
A Short Cut to Happiness by Roger Hall opens at the Fortune Theatre, Dunedin on November 18 and runs until December 17. Directed by Lara Macgregor, it features Elena Stejko, Peter Hayden, Lynn Waldegrave, Cathy Downes, Sylvia Rands, Mary Sutherland, Simon O'Connor and Patrick Davies.
