Feature
Patric’s day
by James McNeish
A pioneer professional’s final production.
Patric Carey, who died last month aged 85, may be said to have founded repertory theatre in New Zealand. He arrived, penniless, from England half a century ago and conducted – on Waiheke Island – what was probably the country’s first professional drama workshop. I know. With a friend, the journalist Jack Tresidder, I was one of his first students. On a couple of novice playwrights the impact of this actor-manager, dynamic and, as he seemed, fully formed, was electrifying.
Patric moved south and in 1961, with his wife Rosalie, opened the Globe Theatre in Dunedin, a private theatre within their home in London St. Twelve years and 178 play productions later, when he left Dunedin, burnt out, he had touched and changed the lives of hundreds of people. He workshopped and premiered all of James K Baxter’s plays and, by wheedling and nurturing actors off the street and luring artists and writers like Ralph Hotere,Marilynn Webb, O E Middleton and Roger Hall to Dunedin on fellowships, created (unpaid) a kind of one-man drama department of Otago University. “You felt,” says Bill Manhire, “that half the university at one time or another was involved in the Careys’ enterprise.”
In goatee, beret, Sherlock Holmes coat, and sometimes carrying a cane, Patric appeared mannered and the establishment scorned him. But the manner was as deceptive as his past was elusive. He never talked of his origins but it seems that, growing up poor in County Cork, he was seized by the Jesuits. Like Thomas Keneally, he was intended for the church but got away. He escaped to London and joined a touring company. When Rosalie Seddon, as she was, met him in 1950 in the west of England, all his possessions “were in two small suitcases”.
As Ian Fraser, Cilla McQueen, David Carnegie and scores of others who worked with him in the 60s have acknowledged, he could galvanise people and turn them into actors virtually overnight. At the Globe he produced, directed, taught, choreographed, built sets, designed costumes and, when necessary, acted.
His influence was out of all proportion to the numbers who saw the plays, according to Fraser. “The Globe anticipated Wellington’s Downstage Theatre. At the time, there was virtually no professional theatre in the country. He gave us a sense of the way repertory theatre should function.”
Probably, as Rosalie Carey writes in her book A Theatre in the House, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Globe, which continues today as an independent theatre, “advanced the arts in New Zealand by about 20 years”.
Patric arrived in Gore in 1983 and there, partnered by the redoubtable Natalie Dolamore, helped establish the now-famous Eastern Southland Gallery in typical manner. At the inauguration of the refurbished old library building, cocking a snook at the polite opening exhibition of Queenstown lakes and mountains, he declared: “An art gallery is not a place for looking at pretty pictures. It is a forum for debate and dissension. There should be blood on the tiles in the vestibule.”
In fact, the speech was made by Natalie, the town librarian, but the words, hatched in his cottage over dinner, were Patric’s. He met the gifted young gallery director, Jim Geddes, and began a working relationship that, over 20 years, has transformed Gore into the alternative artistic capital of New Zealand. With a population of 9000, it today boasts five galleries and museums. Geddes says, “Patric was our mentor. He was in the background for everything we did.”
Speaking at a memorial gathering, Geddes described Patric’s tumbledown cottage when they first met in 1984. “What original internal structure the elderly villa once possessed was gone. The front rooms, transformed into an Aladdin’s cave, had been replaced by archways, podiums, walls of books, sculptures, ceramics and intimate lighting to reveal his substantial collection of New Zealand paintings. To a young local it was a revelation.”
About 80 of us, including some who’d arrived anticipating a visit to the crematorium, foregathered last month at Patric’s villa – “a Chekhovian scene in the living room”, as Cilla McQueen said – not for a funeral but a wake.
Patric had ordained it, leaving the money to pay for the festivities, saved from his pension, in a deposit account. It was his last production.
