Outside, bare cherry trees and limp, slender willows, a low mist on a still afternoon about to turn into a chill night smoked with fog. Christchurch on a winter’s day in June. Inside, thrillingly, at the Merivale townhouse of actor and writer David McPhail, there is a museum, an archive, a special collection of preserved artifacts – behold, on the windowsill of his office, six Feltex awards. It’s like coming across important bones on an archaeological dig. The Feltex engravings have dimmed over the years, but enough is visible to confirm McPhail’s place in New Zealand entertainment history. Best Actor. Entertainer of the Year – twice. Those were the days when TV awards were sponsored by a carpet firm. Actually, those were the days when TV awards had a sponsor.
We’re talking the late 1970s, the early 1980s, when McPhail was – this is such a great old phrase – in his pomp. Director, writer and star of those great old shows, A Week of It and McPhail & Gadsby. The names of his cast and co-writers have a faint layer of dust on them – A K Grant, Jon Gadsby, Ken Ellis, Chris McVeigh, Annie Whittle, Judy Bailey (she appeared in the pilot episode), Peter Rowley, Peter Hawes, and Listener staff writer Bruce Ansley, although the dust in Bruce’s case may be his white beard, sprinkled on his face like coconut icing on a pink lamington. Grant died two years ago. A great many public figures who were merited satirical attention in McPhail’s TV shows are likewise extinct. Including, in 1992, former Prime Minister (1975-84) Sir Robert Muldoon, always McPhail’s most hilarious and best-known impersonation.
Gadsby was at once wilder and more accurate in his caricature of poet Sam Hunt. So much so that anyone else who did Hunt was really doing Gadsby doing Hunt. But it was McPhail’s Muldoon that has remained fixed in the public memory. The hunch, the cackle, the dimple (which McPhail wore on the other side of the face to Muldoon, but no one ever noticed), the small, malevolent eyes. He made the most terrifying man in New Zealand a joke. Played him for laughs, brought him down to a goblin’s size, reduced him to the figure everyone called the all-powerful, thrice-elected Prime Minister behind his back – Piggy Muldoon.
McPhail is about to meet Muldoon again. For the past two or three years, he has been tinkering around with writing a solo show, called, simply, Muldoon; there has been the odd select performance (one at Parliament’s legislative chamber), and a reading at Christ-church’s Court Theatre, where the show now makes its proper debut. He is also booked to perform it at the Auckland Arts Festival in September, and plans to tour it to small towns in 2004. One hour 20 minutes, no interval. And no one else, just McPhail alone onstage, this time taking Muldoon seriously, even affectionately. Yes, a few laughs, but it’s a dramatic piece.
There is something … decent, something satisfying about McPhail reviving Muldoon. For a start, there is the fact that the former PM helped keep the former satirist in work for a great many years (which is one way of saying that McPhail rode on Piggy’s back), and that the play marks an attempt to pay Muldoon back by treating him with respect. The satisfaction, too, of a fine actor – McPhail has held court at Court almost continually for the past several years, and has just completed a season in Great Expectations – playing a role he knows well. So there’s the sense that he was meant to write and star in Muldoon; a mature work by a matured entertainer, a New Zealand past brought to life by someone from that past.
Which is rather to suggest that McPhail is himself a kind of antique. Actually, he is fit and well, 58, with his only-in-Christchurch “my dear fellow!” elocution, a former C of E choirboy who is strangely feminine, like a handsome older woman, with his pretty mouth and mane of grey hair that pours back from the top of his head. Pleasingly, he fills the tidy house with the friendly waft of Peter Stuyvesant cigarette smoke – it’s good for his health: smoking disguises a lifelong stutter. He is not quite plump, and not quite bohemian, although he wears cool black leather boots and has a hole in the elbow of his black jersey. A nice man in a nice home on a cold day, but it only takes a couple of party tricks – a twitch in the cheek, a sound like a creaking stair in his voice – and he is more Muldoon than ever. He is now just a few years younger than the man he plays. Who else could play him? David McPhail, this is your life’s work.
What other Prime Minister of New Zealand would anyone want to play? David Lange still does the best David Lange. Otherwise, we have a history of crashing bores: Holyoake, Marshall, Rowling, Palmer, Bolger. A Jenny Shipley would frighten the horses, a Helen Clark would cost the theatre company its welfare cheque from the Minister of Arts. But a Muldoon – every-one has the same potent memories of Muldoon. Pugnacious, combative, poss-ibly even vile. Short, sneering, with a handshake like a wet fish and eyebrows like a painted lady. The boss, until his disastrous decision to call the snap election in 1984, when National lost to David Lange’s Labour; and then the wilderness years, on the backbench, hamming it up in Rocky Horror, yesterday’s man, a study in pathos.
McPhail’s play is set on the night of the 1984 election. Muldoon is 63. The setting is a hotel suite. “It’s based on a thing that supposedly really happened,” he says. “That on election night, they were at the Mission Bay Bowling Club, which were the headquarters for National’s Tamaki electorate, but at some stage in the evening, probably after they knew they’d lost, they took him off to the old Hyatt Hotel. I gather they were nervous he might play up again, like he did when he announced the election, when he clearly seemed to be under the influence. Anyway, they got him there, and left him there. He was left in a room with his wife, a couple who were close friends, and maybe a couple of other people, I don’t know. But none of his parliamentary colleagues or former ministers. The king was dead.
“And apparently he just opened up to his friends, about his life, about the way he felt about things. He talked for quite a long time … And so Muldoon is what that outburst, or that speech he gave to his friends, might have been. It’s all based on fact. The factual aspects of his life are all there – that thing did happen, he did say that.”
Well, sort of. McPhail read the three books by Muldoon (“Not a great writer. He writes the way he speaks – very blunt, very direct”), and Barry Gustafson’s biography. But Muldoon’s life is obviously given a dramatic shape; and of course there are passages that demanded the author to imagine things, to write fiction. “There’s a section in the play I based on a story where Muldoon was in Rotorua during the election campaign. All the tickets had been sold, but the hall was only half-full – they’d stumped up, but hadn’t bothered to go along, a sign there was clearly something wrong. Anyway, he was addressing the audience, and in the middle of his speech, he suddenly stopped, and began to meander, and he talked about the first time he came to Rotorua when he was a little boy.
“How he got lost at the railway station, and didn’t know where to go. How he wandered down to the lake and the mist was rising, and how he got very frightened. He almost drifted into this reverie. And then he came out of it, and realised where he was, and bang!, he was off again. And I just thought … there’s a man who knows he’s getting near to the end of his line.”
McPhail says this in a quiet voice, with a kind of a sigh, with some sadness. “I was taught by my father,” he says, “to be always careful of the difference between sentiment and sentimentality. ‘Cleave to the one, and despise the other.’” He started impersonating Muldoon on A Week of It in 1977. What did he think of him then? Did he hate him? “Yes. At the height of his powers, I disliked him intensely. Like all my friends, even those who were staunchly National, I thought he was very dangerous.”
Even so, his take-off during the television shows was never vicious. “He was a cartoon character. The shows were cartoons. You know, newspapers have cartoons, and TV has cartoons as well.” But during that era, the Listener’s political cartoonist, Trace Hodgson, memorably drew and portrayed Muldoon as a foaming, ga-ga bastard. A Week of It and McPhail & Gadsby were innocent cartoons. “They were called satirical shows, but in the true sense of satire, they never put the knife between the ribs,” McPhail agrees. “It was always … we said some pretty outrageous things, and made some pretty outrageous assertions, but it was supposed to be funny. We didn’t want people sitting there saying, ‘Oooh, that’s true.’ We wanted them to laugh. I was criticised for being soft, for not going in hard enough, and political figures were aware of that.”
McPhail as the harmless court jester. He’s fond of telling the story about the time he and Gadsby had performed a live cabaret at Phil Warren’s Ace of Clubs in Auckland; McPhail was informed that Muldoon would be in the audience, spotted him – “the spotlight was skimming across the top of his dome” – and went ahead with his parody; afterwards, in the dressing room, “the door burst open, and in came wassisname. Used to be Minister of Immigration. Yes, Aussie Malcolm. And behind him came Muldoon, followed by a photographer from the Herald.” Muldoon put his arm around him, McPhail did his Muldoon face, the photo appeared on the front page the next day.
“I always wondered whether he’d done that deliberately. It wasn’t election year, he didn’t need the publicity, but it would certainly pull the rug out from under my feet. And it did. I sat next to a businessman on a flight to Wellington, and he said, ‘Oh, you’ll be staying out at Vogel House. You two are mates, eh.’ I remember saying to Gadsby after that, that we could call Muldoon any name we liked, but it wouldn’t have half the effect.”
Aussie Malcolm, Phil Warren, the Ace of Clubs … again, the layer of dust. Muldoon himself is dated, which is also to say he’s dead and buried. What relevance, then, is McPhail’s monologue in 2003?
His answer, sensibly, is not to bother with such an inane question, which implies a performance must have the fresh paint of headline news. His play is a night at the theatre. And so he says, “It’s a study … no, it’s not a study, it’s a look at power, and what happens when you lose power. That you can be absolutely on top of everything, and in the space of five minutes, it’s gone. And what happens to you? And what happens to your so-called colleagues, when you are no longer in a position to threaten or intimidate them, or control them? A lot of them disagreed with calling the snap election, but were too frightened to say anything. I say in the play, ‘Will anyone counsel against this decision?’ And then I say, ‘I waited a full 15 seconds for an answer.’ So the play is about the way a person, who actually enjoys the exercise of power, reacts to that.”
McPhail is keen to state the bleeding obvious: this is not a skit. “People always associate me with the Muldoon caricature – a very crude caricature; no subtlety about it at all – in the comedy shows. I have to make it quite clear that this isn’t a stand-up routine, this isn’t a cabaret. So I have to shed a lot of the caricatures, because that’s all I ever did, and it’s easy to slip into that.
“You’ve got to be true to the spirit. I mean, he was a real human being. You’ve got to be true to the language he probably would have used. For instance, he never swore; he had a dislike of foul language.
“After I did the show in Parliament, in front of the usual suspects – members of his staff, plus some of his friends – one or two people told me afterwards that he was a much worse bastard than I’d portrayed him. But … in researching for the play, and learning of his background, his lack of social graces and his awareness of that, and the frustration he felt because he was actually very bright and not a lot of people understood that, I did in fact become a lot more sympathetic towards him.
“You know, and the way he was brought up by his mother and grandmother, as an only child, probably spoilt, surrounded by two fairly forceful women in his formative years. He was socially shy, but he also had this bold, brash, angry side of him.” The great impersonator considers Robert David Muldoon. “An intriguing guy,” he says. “Really, really strange.”
Muldoon, Court One, June 28 – July 12