Bruce Mason Solo

Description

Title: Bruce Mason Solo: Four Plays for Solo Performance
Author: Bruce Mason
Publisher: Price Milburn and Company, with Victoria University Press, Wellington, 1981
Format: Hardback with dust jacket
Condition: Excellent — small inscription on interior page. No other markings

Description:

Bruce Mason performed The End of the Golden Weather almost a thousand times. He took it to every town and city in New Zealand, to Edinburgh in 1963, to London, to Australia. He performed it alone — a table, a chair, his voice, and nothing else. Howard McNaughton, the foremost NZ theatre scholar, called it “easily the most popular single work that New Zealand drama has produced.” McNaughton also called Mason “the proven master of all New Zealand theatre.”

Bruce Mason Solo gathers four of his five solo scripts: The End of the Golden Weather, To Russia, with Love, Not Christmas, but Guy Fawkes, and Courting Blackbird. The centrepiece is Golden Weather — the story of a boy’s summer on a Takapuna beach during the Depression, his friendship with Firpo, a man-child who dreams of running in the Olympics, and the loss of innocence that follows when he understands what the adult world has done to that dream. Mason drew it from his own boyhood. He never stopped performing it: “Every audience is different; every audience a new challenge.”

The other three plays extend Mason’s world — Russian society as a dark mirror of NZ life, the particular textures of provincial NZ experience, the intimate spoken relationship between a lone performer and a room full of people. To read them together is to understand a playwright who spent his career reaching for a larger life than the one his society offered, and who found that the most powerful theatre he could make required nothing but himself.

Mason co-founded Downstage, Wellington’s first professional theatre, in 1964. He edited Te Ao Hou, the Māori cultural magazine, from 1960-61. He was theatre critic, music critic, broadcaster, and translator of Chekhov. He died in Wellington on 31 December 1982. The End of the Golden Weather was filmed by Ian Mune in 1991 and won eight NZ Film Awards. The Bruce Mason Centre in Takapuna was named in his honour in 1996.

This is the 1981 hardback first edition, with dust jacket.

Why We Stock It:

The scripts of the most performed solo theatrical work in NZ history, collected in the only physical edition that exists, which is now out of print. A piece of NZ cultural history in a format that will not be reprinted.