However you choose to read the title of Roger Hall’s new play, it’s apt. Six men, all literary in some sense, meet at the (also aptly named) Sour Dough cafe. There’s little action – these are gold-card people – and not a lot of plot.

What there is, for the audience, is delight – shelf-loads of it. Each of the very different characters is highly believable, even recognisable, and the actors, mostly veterans of Hall plays, present them superbly.

Seriously hard up poet Bert is played with deep dejection by Richard Huber; former editor Paul, who still manages an overseas trip or two, is portrayed with conviction by Dougal Stevenson. Peter Hayden looks increasingly insecure as actor Peter, so dependent on the sound of applause that he has it as his phone’s ring tone.

Phil Grieve bounces from elation to despair as novelist Jeff and Barry de Lore, as Phil, shows us the highs and lows of the playwriting life. Geoffrey Heath makes sure that freelance writer Martin, something of a pedant, comes across as thoroughly likeable, and Julie Edwards lives up to the cafe’s name as unsympathetic manager Bronwyn, whose comprehension of the literary world is marginal at best.

The characters revisit old grudges, bemoan their relative or actual penury, struggle with technology and lament the declining standards of English usage and just about everything else. Their witty and entertaining dialogue never sags, and the play ends brilliantly.

Peter King’s set depicts the outside of the cafe, the men’s preferred spot, and is cleverly enhanced with images of books.

Director Lara Macgregor makes the most of the play’s erudite charm and ensures that this world premiere production is a great success. Saturday night’s audience certainly thought so, and so did I. Everyone with even faintly bookish tendencies should go and, for the curmudgeons among us, attendance should be compulsory.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

Book Ends, Roger Hall’s entertaining new play selected to start Fortune’s 2014 season, is an offering sure to please.  The title is open to interpretation: let me try. 

The Cabin Fever Club (based on one Hall actually started in Ponsonby), which meets at the Sour Dough Cafe, comprises six writers who are at the Ends of their working lives.  Despite their real and affected cynicism about the book world, they are still anxious to be involved.  But what of the menacing advance of technology, threatening their very livelihood?  Will it mean the End of Books? 

The four scenes at the cafe take place a year apart, and so we see the men first panic, then come to terms with each new technological development, using smartphones and reading newspapers online while recalling regretfully the days when the Guardian Weekly was posted out from England ‘on almost translucent airmail paper’. It gives a nice smug feeling to be reminded of how far we’ve come. Is it really only a couple of years ago we were freaking out over iPads? And now I read (online) of a school where every student is given one.

The attractive set by Peter King remains the same throughout, the exterior of a modest cafe, except that whimsically the walls are colourful bookshelves, the windows giant handwritten pages.  The chairs to the outside tables are bright cheerful turquoise, and the stage floor merits close observation.

The sound and light design (by Stephen Kilroy*) cleverly suggests the changing seasons: I particularly liked Stormy Weather over the sound of rain, though Paperback Writer made a happy opening. 

The immaculately produced programme (cover like a Penguin novel; a scarily comprehensive chronology of Hall’s plays inside) has a picture of the cast in front of Dunedin’s iconic Mazagran Espresso Bar. It’s a marvellous, tiny cafe where you actually incur a penalty charge for takeaway coffee, because you’re not taking the proper time to slow down and appreciate it as you should. 

This is not an attitude shared by Cabin Fever’s watering hole, the Sour Dough Cafe. Julie Edwards, in a most welcome return to the Fortune, is perfect as head waitress Bronwyn, whether coyly starstruck over a ‘real’ Shortland St actor, or grumpily complaining about the men eking out one coffee for an hour of cafe-squatting.  Her hawking of her unemployed son’s vampire manuscript is a delight.

By its nature this is a static play.  One of the Hall plays seen here recently had as its setting a dance class, and the action was accordingly frenetic. The last I reviewed was You can always give them back, with even the grandparents singing and dancing with gusto.  Here six old men sit outside a cafe and talk, that’s all, and not much scope for accomplished director Lara Macgregor to move them (though we relish all the more little moments like the group with military precision observing something happening across the street).

But their talk is amusing and pertinent, and through it we witness the world changing swiftly around them, and empathise with their attempts to keep up. The pace is great, the audience is with them all the way, and the laughter is pretty well continuous. 

It’s easy to underestimate the work that goes into creating that laughter.  In Playmarket’s useful recent publication Twenty New Zealand Playwrights, Hall tells Michelanne Forster, “the phrase ‘Hall’s one-liners’ comes up frequently, as if I am using some sort of cheating device.  And a good one-liner is very hard to write.  It’s gold.”  In Book Ends what I shall call Hall’s aphorisms and ripostes are often biting as well as funny, for our literary scene is one on which he has plenty to say.  

A Cabin Fever Club is surely an excellent idea, offering men who work at home the chance to get together and bounce ideas off each other. (My uncle, a brilliant sculptor, spent his days in his studio where he began to evolve some very funny notions about the world.)  This one, though, does tend to operate like the old gentlemen’s clubs: I like their blackballing of potential members who have given them bad reviews. 

Although these gents are friends who form a tight, supportive unit, much of the humour comes from their dry put-downs of each other.  Like Jane Austen, I am wary of pretending I know what men talk about by themselves, so I check with my own gentleman guest who assures me that yes, men do tend to be very competitive when they get together, even when they are mates.  Strange. 

Yet the actors, like the characters, operate as a great ensemble, and each of the distinguished veteran actors inhabits his character more than comfortably. 

Dougal Stevenson is suave and controlled as Paul the publisher, financially the most successful of the Club.  He is well aware though of the precarious state of his business, as companies merge or go off-shore, and indeed he arrives brandishing a Kindle, crying dramatically, “I have seen the future!”

Silver haired (and voiced) Peter Hayden is very believable as an ex core cast member of Shortland St, who has just been killed off (“so out of character!”) because of his struggle with lines.  While the waitress spoils him with extra marshmallows, the men affect not to have watched the programme, though their wives send sympathetic messages. 

Geoffrey Heath gives a pleasantly laid-back and credible performance as a freelance journalist and ghost writer, which allows him a little mystery and provides for a neat twist later.  He and Hayden kick-start Book Ends amusingly with a delightfully pedantic analysis of the use of ‘decimated’. 

Richard Huber as Bert is initially the saddest figure, a once-feted poet, now reduced to desperate penny-pinching.  Huber gives a lovely delivery of one of his poems, to a predictably wry response from his auditors: “It has a familiar ring.” 

Costume designer Maryanne Wright-Smyth has had particular fun with Bert’s opshop clothing and odd harness of three pairs of glasses slung round his neck, again setting the scene for dramatic transformation, played with relish by Huber. 

Phil Grieve is Jeff, the fairly misogynistic writer of historical novels with lots of bonking (“I want to make some sales!”) whose explosive entries on a bicycle invariably bring energy to the scene. Grieve’s expressive face is splendidly adapted to produce Jeff’s mostly grumpy, frustrated or furious moods. 

Barry de Lore lends a jaunty demeanour and impeccable timing to Phil, the playwright who gets to voice (one suspects) many of Hall’s beliefs, groaning comically over a poor production of one of his plays: “I grieve over every laugh lost.”  As he fumes over the management’s folly in seating him right behind a critic, I am acutely aware, to my consternation, that seated immediately behind me is Hall himself.  (Well, it is the premiere.)  This is altogether too damn relevant, and it is hard not to cringe when Phil suggests a swift blow to the back of the critic’s head might be in order!

Critics may get a bash, but the broad sweep of the discussion of issues relevant to bookish types manages to include tributes to many of our writers.  There are many purely New Zealand references, from the details of Ruth Park’s royalties to the joke about Hairy Maclary which won a huge laugh. But there are erudite bits outside my knowledge too: who knew there was such a word as ‘apricity’, meaning the warmth of the sun in winter?  Lovely.  And somehow suited to these old boys sharing camaraderie in their winter years… 

Which brings me back to the title.  After rumination, I prefer to see these valiant old battle scarred warriors as the bookends that support our row of literary achievements, from poetry and play scripts to travel articles and ‘the 50 best-of’s.  And who after all has provided more illustrious support to the theatre scene than Roger Hall?  So it seems totally appropriate that the Fortune, which in 2014 celebrates 40 years of productions as does Hall, should have chosen Book Ends to launch its Anniversary Year.  Good luck to both, and need I duck? 
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* Competently operated, I note, by Alexandra Ross,  co-recipient of last year’s Emerging Artist Award – backstage crews must have been delighted to see one of their own recognised at last!

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer