October 29, 2009

Downstage statement on the passing of Martyn Sanderson

Dan Slevin           posted 15 Oct 2009, 02:42 PM / edited 15 Oct 2009, 10:46 PM

It is with great sorrow that the Board, Staff and Members of Downstage Theatre, received news of the passing last night of founder and former director, Martyn Sanderson. 

Martyn was one of several visionary Wellingtonians who worked together in 1963 and 1964 to start Downstage, Wellington’s first professional theatre, and he appeared in or directed many early productions, including starring with Peter Bland in the first production on the Cambridge Terrace site: Edward Albee’s Zoo Story. 

Downstage Director Hilary Beaton says that Martyn’s positive influence has remained with the theatre throughout the 45 years of our existence: “I would like to pay tribute to Martyn for his tireless support for our work and for the principles on which we depend. He and Wanjiku were tremendously welcoming to me when I arrived at Downstage and he noted that our current programming philosophy owes a lot to the original Downstage vision of those early days.” 

In John Smythe’s book, Downstage Upfront, Martyn is quoted about those days: “… I felt arrogant enough to propose we discard the whole tradition and work it out for ourselves, starting from as close to nowhere as we possibly could, I had a sort of vision of theatre which was to reach out into the community, to be a forum for debate and the arts in whatever form they presented themselves, to break down the conventions that created ‘sacred space’, this sacrosanct invisible barrier between the public and the people who were representing them to themselves.” 

It is entirely appropriate that at the time of his passing Martyn was still producing theatre in that very same vein: Muntu (directed by Wakanyote Njuguna from Kenya) is produced by Martyn and Wanjiku Sanderson’s Africa Connection Aotearoa Trust, and will feature performances by Toi Whakaari drama students and people from the local African community. In theatre, the show must always go on and the scheduled performances of Muntu will go ahead this weekend with support from Downstage and many others. 

To honour Martyn’s contribution to Downstage, and to theatre in New Zealand, there will be a minute’s silence in the Hannah Playhouse auditorium prior to tonight’s performance of Biography of My Skin.

Editor    posted 16 Oct 2009, 10:23 AM

INFORMATION ON MUNTU

Muntu, by Ghanaian playwright Joe de Graft, is directed by Wakanyote Njuguna, a Kenyan playwright, theatre director, actor, artist and educator. His Assistant Director is Kenyan actress and poet, Wanjiku Kiarie Sanderson and the producer was the late Martyn Sanderson.

Muntu is an epic work, of classical proportions, that symbolically represents the history, philosophy, politics, economics and cultures of Africa. Unlike the text-books and academic journals where these matters are usually discussed, Muntu vibrates with the energy of drumming, songs, dance, mime, poetry and dramatic confrontation that bring the issues to life.

At its first production, Muntu raised issues, including the historical function of the Christian churches in Africa, that led to heated argument. Thirty years later, it stands up very well as a provocative, engaging platform for debate.

When / Where:

Friday 16 October, 7.30 p.m.

Otaki Memorial Hall, Main Street, Otaki.

Tickets at Otaki Travel, 74 Main Street. (06) 364 8415

$15, $10 concession, high school and wânanga students $5.

Saturday 17 October, 2.00 p.m. and 8.00 p.m.

Lower Hutt Little Theatre, Library Bldg, 2 Queens Drive.

Tickets at Downstage (04) 801 6946 and door sales

$15, $10 concession, high school students $5.

Sunday 18th October, 3.00 p.m.

Toi Whakaari/NZ Drama and Dance Centre,

11 Hutchison Rd, Newtown, Wellington.

Tickets at Downstage (04) 801 6946 and door sales

$15, $10 concession, Toi Whakaari students $5.

Editor    posted 29 Oct 2009, 10:57 PM

This is the life that Martyn built

By Simon Cunliffe on Wed, 21 Oct 2009

ODT Opinion

Humble, gentle, forthright, political, intellectual, honest, seeker of justice, protector of values. Almost to a person the eulogists built their memories on these shared frames of reference. My friend Martyn constructed his life upon them.

You may have noticed the obits – parked away on the Obituaries pages, devoted as they are to the newly departed; or heard reference on the radio, a sound bite here or there.

Perhaps even TV stirred from its slothful, orgiastic embrace with mammon for long enough to rate a fleeting farewell for a man to whom it owes much, but from whose world view it has so stridently diverged. If so, I must have missed it.

In any case, it is a matter of public record. Poet, writer, actor, activist and free-thinker Martyn Sanderson is dead.

The essentials of his CV were in the written appreciations: born 1938 in the back of a Model-T Ford in Granity, near Westport to a writer mother and a missionary father; a scholarship to Christ’s College; then on to the dreaming spires of Oxford and Cambridge where, in England’s green and pleasant land, this Antipodean student of divinity lost – at least temporarily – his faith and began to find his own voice.

Along the way he cast off the straitjacket of conventional wisdom. (Not for him the concrete ankle braces of a narrow and rigid spirituality, although in ways he remained the most spiritual of men.)

He was an early leading light in New Zealand professional theatre; he ate up large chunks of the screen during the “new wave” of New Zealand cinema in the late ’70s and early ’80s, eventually chalking up 26 movies; he featured in television series such and The Governor.

Contemporary audiences might know him best as the querulous fly fisherman in the Lotto TV commercial who sees his bounty plucked from the river by a poaching bungy-jumper.

But that’s only a small, and the most visible, part of his story. It was at Oxford he developed a passion for theatre. He returned home in the Sixties energetic, driven and searching . . . He wanted to develop a professional theatre. And he wasn’t going to sit around and wait for a long-talked-about proposal of various repertory societies to bear fruit.

He gathered like-minded Wellington people about him – Tim Eliott, Harry Seresin, Peter Bland et al – and just did it. And partly he did it because what he wanted theatre to say was urgent. Downstage, the first fully professional theatre in the country, became an essential spoke in an evolving home-grown “culture”.

Ian Mune, another grand old man of stage and screen, put it thus: “There was something about this singular man that drew people together . . . and turned the tide, not just in theatre but in the evolution of the arts as part of our community.”

Martyn Sanderson did not found Downstage because he needed to bathe in the glow of acclaim; nor experience the warm embrace of an audience slapping palms raw, or footstamping the foundations loose at an exquisite display of the actor’s craft.

No, he built a theatre as much to shake the foundations of his audience’s world: to challenge, to confront, to question, to argue, to set a-thinking – and in many respects only then to entertain. This was the central conversation of his career, this restless questing, this compulsive interrogation – political, cultural, artistic. And this impulse describes the largely hidden arc of his real accomplishments.

It must have been a grave disappointment to this gentle giant of the arts to see how craven we have become before the all-conquering mantra of the market; to the notion of “bums-on-seats” and bugger the inherent quality.

He died last Wednesday night having put his heart and soul, and probably what little personal financial resource he and his wife Wanjiku had left, into mounting a production of the East African classic theatrepiece, Muntu. As a tribute to him, the show opened as planned on the Saturday.

We buried him on Monday, on the hill behind the beautiful Rangiatea Church, up north in Otaki, after a moving multicultural service, the eloquence of his children and grandchildren a compelling tribute to his virtues and values. Like the rest of us, of course, he wasn’t perfect.

I first met Martyn in London, interviewing him about Patu!, the film of the 1981 Springbok tour protests, on which he had collaborated. Our friendship fastened over the years as he came and went.

He could be fierce, and he had a prodigious appetite for the grog, his distinctive rasping voice stabbing its accusatory finger into your chest, when he’d had a few: “If you want to write something worthwhile, stop talking about it and just do it.” If I ever do, it will be in no small part thanks to him.

– Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.