Prolific playwright and ‘script doctor’ struggled to get political plays produced

In the midst of the coronavirus melodrama, normal life and death processes seem to be suspended or unnoticed. But playwright Dean Parker has died unexpectedly, and the fact must be recorded, outside his bubble.

Parker, who was 72, was a prolific writer of the well-crafted, three-act play (so prolific he has at least 38 titles to his credit).

His career paralleled that other writer of well-crafted plays, Roger Hall. But whereas Hall has written about the foibles of the Kiwi middle and wannabe middle class (who tend to be the theatre goers) and as a consequence achieved popularity with that mainstream audience, Parker was a leftie who wrote about political subjects and social contradiction, so had a career-long struggle getting his plays produced.

Rather than bums on seats, he was interested in ideas in the mind. He required a national theatre like the Royal Court, with managers who hold on to the Greek tradition of the theatre playing a vital role in the necessary democratic debates among citizens, rather than the provincial theatres’ struggle to survive as they compete with beers around the barbie and commercial television.

Parker noted, with his customary irony, that the British playwright David Hare, someone with a similar social consciousness, was commissioned by the National Theatre Company to write a play about the invasion of Iraq, as it was happening. Something unthinkable in New Zealand.

But Parker was never bitter about the struggle to get his plays produced, and he kept on writing no matter what, adapting several classics, from Kafka’s The Trial to Macbeth to Dickens’ Great Expectations, love stories of Maoists in Beijing, to Blair Peach, to a Ma¯ ori runner who could beat Lovelock.

Of late, BATS in Wellington proved a sympathetic venue, with even a small theatre company being keen to put on his work. But a BATS co-op is not capable of providing a living, and Parker never bothered the arts council, so he sensibly made his money though writing for film and television.

His credits include Came a Hot Friday ,as well as episodes of Buck House and Mortimer’s Patch. This led to his work helping to found the NZ Writers Guild, which set itself up to negotiate on behalf of writers with the main employers: National Radio and television and the NZ Producers Association.

He was determined that it would be a trade union, affiliated with the Council of Trade Unions, with writers seen as workers selling their labour rather than starving geniuses in the attic. Despite some initial success, this remains an uphill struggle.

Parker became renowned as a script doctor for film projects – if a script wasn’t working, send it to Dean. Once the producers of a film about to go into production were tearing their hair out over a script that had gone through umpteen versions and called on him to help. Send me the first draft, he requested.

They did so and he retyped the script and sent it back with his invoice. That’s it, they enthused, that’s what we’ve been looking for.

He had a sardonic relationship with the Auckland Theatre Company, which was logically his production house. But think of the Remuera crowd, they would plead with him as he presented them with another wellcrafted play written from a working-class consciousness. F... them, he would reply.

Like any expert craftsman, he kept himself out of the work, although for a playwright that is difficult. He revealed something of his past when he gave the Rona Bailey lecture last year for the Labour History Project (a recording is available on its website).

He talked of the influences of Catholicism and his Napier teachers, his mother who adored musicals and followed the royal family, his father who preferred the races and never read a book, the impact of the themes and events of the late 1960s, the Irish struggles and his flirtation with the Party.

Parker loved James Joyce and Molly Bloom’s monologue. Of all his plays, Greek Fire, set in Cairo during World War II and with John Mulgan at its centre, seems most like him. Sadly, I don’t think it has ever been produced. I saw a rehearsed reading and it has stayed with me.

There was something of the foreign agent to Parker, the cadre in hiding, the monk in his cell, and he felt a kinship with Mulgan, the Kiwi who wrote Man Alone, went to Oxford, served with the British Army, worked with the Greek resistance, experienced the dreadful betrayal of that country’s Left after the war and committed suicide.

Parker’s one venture into prose fiction was to write a sequel to Man Alone, which he called after the main character, Johnson. In this novel he filled in the after-story of the Man Alone protagonist. As Parker commented with a grin, it sold about six copies.

I never attempted the mainstream theatre but, like Parker, kept on working no matter what, and he appreciated that.

He will be sadly missed, a man out of his time, out of place in some ways, yet resolutely creative, maintaining a culture which, one day, hopefully soon, the world will return to.

RIP comrade. – By Paul Maunder

Parker was never bitter about the struggle to get his plays produced, and he kept on writing no matter what ...