March 7, 2014

DENISE WALSH – Obituary  

The death yesterday in Dunedin at the age of 71 of the well-known writer and director of plays for young people, Denise Walsh, was announced by the playwright’s agent, Murray Lynch, Director of Playmarket, the New Zealand playwrights’ agency and script development service.

Denise Walsh is only the second New Zealand playwright (after Bruce Mason) and one of the few internationally (Harold Pinter and Noel Coward in London’s West End, Eugene O’Neill and Neil Simon on Broadway) to have a theatre named in her honour. The performing arts auditorium at Logan Park High School in North Dunedin, where until recently she was a long-serving teacher, is now to bear her name.

Her own secondary education in the late 1950s was at Queen’s High School in working class South Dunedin where she was inspired by the English teaching of the well-known educationalist, Pat Harrison, and took part in some of her innovative drama productions.

Having trained in the early 1960s as a teacher of commercial subjects (typing and shorthand) she initially taught them at Linwood High School in Christchurch before returning to Dunedin in 1966 to a position at the city’s then technical high school, King Edward Technical College.  In the course of her time there she obtained a Social Workers Certificate and became a Guidance Teacher.  In 1971 she directed a production of Shaw’s Pygmalion for the College.

The Technical College closed in the mid-1970s and the staff transferred to the newly opened Logan Park High School which offered a full array of subjects and courses and was zoned to attract the North Dunedin-dwelling children of academics at nearby Otago University.  The Technical College had always had a strong reputation for its musical activities and these were resumed at Logan Park but Denise Walsh quickly set out to put the new school on the map in the drama field as well.  By 1979 she had been appointed Teacher in Charge of Drama and the following year she completed her Licentiates from Trinity College (London) and the New Zealand Speech Board (now Speech New Zealand).

For its first decade, her major productions for Logan Park High School were generally of established Broadway musicals.  However, from 1979 onwards school teams were also entered in the annual One-Act Play competitions organized by the New Zealand Theatre Federation (now Theatre New Zealand) and by the mid-1980s Denise Walsh was beginning to write plays for these groups.  By the 1990s she was also writing the book and lyrics for the school’s major musical productions (and often for an annual junior production as well) with scores being written for them by Dunedin-based composers such as Anthony Ritchie and Michael Norris.

She first accepted an international invitation to show her work as writer and director in 1987, travelling to the Thespian Festival for North American high school groups held in Muncie, Indiana.  She returned to this festival on many occasions over the next twenty years and also took Logan Park High School groups to similar events in Australia, Canada, Germany, Monaco, Japan (where she also adjudicated at the Toyama International Drama Festival) and Korea.  More recently she was an invited New Zealand delegate to an International Women Playwrights’ conference in India.

As a result of her annual commitment to its One Act Play Festivals, she became involved with the administration of the New Zealand Theatre Federation, this country’s umbrella organization for amateur dramatic societies.  She was its National President from 1995 to 1999 and again from 2005 to 2008 and was made a Life Member in recognition of her long-standing contribution to the organisation. An accredited adjudicator, she was a member of the New Zealand Association of Drama Adjudicators.

Denise Walsh was one of the key teachers involved in the push for Drama to be accepted as a stand-alone subject in the New Zealand secondary school curriculum, a move facilitated by the replacement of the School Certificate / Sixth Form Certificate / University Bursary qualification system with the current National Certificate of Educational Attainment which now allows for credits in Drama achievement standards at all levels of the senior school.  She was an Executive member of the New Zealand Association for Drama in Education and also of Speech New Zealand, the umbrella organization for speech teaching and examining in this country.  A number of the students she taught at Logan Park High School won scholarships to study Theatre at American universities and to attend the Shakespeare’s Globe programmes in London.

In the late 1980s she served for a term on the Board of the Fortune Theatre, Dunedin’s professional theatre, and also directed a production at the city’s long-established amateur venue, the Globe Theatre.

Denise Walsh was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2013 New Year’s Honours list for her services to youth theatre.

She was undeniably one of the most prolific writers of plays for and about adolescents that this country has produced.  Playmarket holds scripts for at least two dozen of them.  Her time as a guidance teacher is reflected time and again in her choice of themes related to the teenage experience.  Among the better-known titles (and topics) are Audition for Life (body image), Family Secrets (incest), He Hou Toku Moemoea / This Is My New Dream (cross-cultural teen pregnancy), It’s In Your Own Hands (suicide), Spirals of the Mind (anorexia) and That’s Hardly Fair (gender relations).

Denise is survived by her staunchest supporter, husband Peter Neville.