“We want a story that starts out with an earthquake and works its way up to a climax” is a quote about movie-making attributed to Hollywood director Sam Goldwyn of MGM. 

In a prescient precursor to the quakes that shook the city on Sunday, Peninsula director Paul McLaughlin could have been reading from Goldwyn’s handbook by giving Centrepoint’s new production [of Gary Henderson’s award-winning play] a cinematic style launch worthy of a big screen blockbuster.

With the lights down and the opening credits rolling on the stylised weatherboard cyc, the sub bass rumbling starts. The reverberation gradually intensifies until, thanks to the newly installed sensuround sound system, the whole theatre vibrates. It’s as if the whole laden auditorium is being physically shunted, crunching back through the years to the time when Peninsula is set, circa 1963/64.

This latter day tribute to Bruce Mason’s The End of the Golden Weather takes place in the settlement of Duvauchelle on the idyllic shores of Akaroa Harbour. Here 10 year-old Michael Hope, his younger sister Ngaire and their friends Alex and Lynette among others, play and go to school without too many cares.

They have a new sole-charge teacher in Gordon MacIntyre, a city boy putting in his obligatory country service. Gordon tells the kids that Banks Peninsula was once a volcano, and this fires Michael’s imagination. The youngster sets about filling a schoolbook with maps detailing his surroundings and those who people them. This so impresses his teacher that the school science fair in distant Christchurch beckons.

To think that Google Maps may have started this way as a spark of similar youthful inspiration. 

That’s not the only tie-in with our modern world, however. Who needs the GCSB when there’s Rhonda the operator on the shared wind-up phone party-line listening in on everybody’s conversations, and spreading the goss around. Her off-duty words will help change Michael’s world and undo at least one character. 

And then, there’s the blind unreasoned prejudice towards anyone who is not considered mainstream, complete with the casual unthinking racism and sexism of the period – attitudes that still exist in many quarters. The auditorium hasn’t been shunted anywhere very far at all. 

While the soundscape [Chris Ward], set [Daniel Williams] and lighting [Jennifer Lal] combine to produce striking atmosphere, mood and effects never seen or heard before at Centrepoint, it’s the actors who provide Peninsula with its soul and its real clout. Each of the five performers take two roles each – youngster and adult, and Pug – a pet dog, rendered in brilliantly effusive fashion by Jason Whyte.

Throughout, the transitions are faultless. The characters that the team of actors Phil Vaughan, Michelle Amas, Laura Hill, Stephen Papps and Whyte create are perfectly pitched, thoroughly believable and singularly memorable.

A rare immersion experience, this slice of imminent nostalgia is fluent, funny, intelligent, evocative, multi-layered story-telling that effectually reflects our present through our not so distant past.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

My bedroom, my family’s house, our little settlement Duvauchelle, Akaroa Harbour, Banks Pensinsula, the South Island, New Zealand, the World, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe … So, more or less, in the early 1960s, ten-year-old Michael maps the small part of the world within which he is living his life, within the wider world he’s been told about.

Henderson’s play re-creates and maps for us that milieu, the lives of a bunch of its people, before stuff happens, and when stuff does happen.

Henderson unobtrusively gets things utterly right: the sense of that kind of place and that time (few then had cars, fewer still had television sets, school-kids had ample space to devise their own adventures), dialogue that rings true, characters who are recognisable without being stereotyped or two-dimensional, an action that offers fresh twists and developments through to the end.

Four school-age kids and their dog are getting along happily enough, scarcely aware of tensions among their restless, frustrated parents. The school-teacher who comes to their one-teacher school means well, mostly does well, yet serves as a catalyst for crap happening. Mostly well-meaning individuals get things wrong; a kind of innocence goes down the dunny. 

This is a new production of the play, with Paul McLaughlin directing, yet related to the recent Circa production in which he played Michael, plus the adult Bruce, with these roles taken over very capably by Stephen Papps. Otherwise the cast are the same, with all five cast-members playing two roles each. Naturally a smooth assurance and a richness of interactions and nuancing characterises in their collective performance.

Having seen the Circa production, during the 2012 Festival, I find it hard to pick differences from that. Maybe the noises and thunderstorm at the beginning are more prolonged and emphatic. I don’t remember the working tap, and the business with the child Ngaire having to start the first school-day with the new teacher having to go wash her stinkingly sheep-turdy bare feet. Maybe they were there …

Either way, it’s very neat, in what it shows about the indifference to such of the rural children and the fastidiousness of this city-bred teacher. I don’t recall the episode in which Michael throws stones at the off-stage character Shirley getting quite so savage. 

At any rate, McLaughlin’s directing works well, with never-faltering transitions between sequences. Stephen Papps as Michael conveys vividly both the physicality of the ten-year-old and his mindfulness, his imaginings. As Bruce there’s a clearly distinguished stiff tallness, a latent bitter anger with his lot that sometimes breaks through.

Laura Hill is Ngaire, Michael’s skipping-around younger sibling, delightfully vivacious, and Sylvia, Bruce’s impulsive, frustrated wife.

Phil Vaughan has heaps of vitality as Michael’s friend Alex, and the sequence in which they ride their home-made trolley downhill captures the drama of it wonderfully. As Michael and Ngaire’s dad Jack, he’s a straightforward ordinary joker, of his time.

Which means that – even when reminded of it – he simply doesn’t notice the daily drudgery he leaves to his wife Val, played by Michele Amas as a decent woman who worries about things, and would like wider scope. She’s also good keen school-girl Lynette.

Jason Whyte doubles the school-teacher Mr MacIntosh, a tidy, rather lonely man, with the endearing dog Pug, alternately eagerly dashing around, or flopped down exhausted. 

Daniel Williams’s set is unfussily functional, with a substantial pool downstage left of real water, which the tap drains into, and a patch of trellis mid-to-upstage right to mask that entrance, provides domesticity. Jennifer Lal’s lighting usefully conveys moods and shifts focus.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer