If a suburban amateur theatre group had come up with The Fundraiser to give themselves and their friends a bit of a romp through familiar ground, I’d have said fair enough, if that’s what you want to do with your spare time, go for it.

But Centrepoint is a professional company that draws on taxpayer, ratepayer and corporate funding as well as its box-office. We have a right to expect better from them and indeed with Sebastian Hurrell’s Palangi Loi / Tongan White Boy (reviewed 9 April) Centrepoint showed it could nurture a new work through to its premiere with excellent results.

Written by Cheryl Amos, The Fundraiser follows a homegrown popular theatre tradition begun nearly a decade ago by then artistic director Alison Quigan, usually working with a co-writer. Being actors first, writers next, their shows generally offer plenty of wacky performance opportunities but lack the depth that could make them classical Kiwi comedies.

Ideally Centrepoint could be New Zealand’s answer to actor/ writer/ director Alan Ayckbourn’s Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough (UK), which has incubated plays that have invariably gone on to be produced by Britain’s National Theatre, transfer to the West End and enjoy new incarnations around the world.

If Quigan et al were making paint-by-numbers imitations of the likes of Ayckbourn, Amos has dished up the kitsch tea-towel replica. Frankly I am shocked that The Fundraiser could be scheduled for a 6-week season when the script, let alone the production, falls so far short of its potential. This suggests to me that the perpetrators don’t even know what’s missing, like credibility for instance.

The premise is fine in principle. A slack treasurer has failed to open mail and the Longburn Playgroup finds itself with one week to raise $1,400-odd or they’ll be turfed out of their local church hall premises. Leaving aside the notion that no-one is this small community actually talks to each other – wouldn’t the vicar or a vestry person have said something to someone as the situation worsened? – at least it gives motive force to the forward action.

But the ineptness of the small committee of playgroup mums in running a sausage sizzle then a cake stall at the side of a state highway, rather than at a shopping centre, is beyond belief. Besides which, do they have no experience let alone friends, neighbours and families to lend even a modicum or support? What kind of community is this?

Committee chair Margot Mitchell-Potts is a totally two-dimensional control-freak harridan and – as if she and director Kate Louise-Elliott think we’ll be too thick to get it – Dushka Blakely plays it so over-the-top that when the opportunity for pathos and empathy is suddenly and arbitrarily introduced, it has no effect. If a writer, then their actors and director, can’t warm to the fallibilities and vulnerabilities that make their flawed characters human, why should the audience give a damn?

Faylene, the disorganised, lactating, farting (yes, it’s that level of humour), cheap wine-drinking treasurer, gets a better go in the writing and at the hands of Jane Donald, although since she tries so hard to do a Kiwi accent (being English), I do wish someone would coach her properly. Faylene’s journey from inept to successful organiser, however, is marred through slim motivation and a pseudo magic-realism sequence that makes her transition meaningless, even if it does get the scene changed for the karaoke finale.

Angela Green finds humanity and humour in Sharmaine, a refugee from an exclusive sect. Her daughter, Shania, is the centre of her life but the father is a Mâori gansta bludger called Rooster, given the full stereotype treatment by Sebastian Hurrell. When diminutive Charmaine summons the capacity to knee him in the balls, after he threatens to take Shania off her, he just whimpers off.

And does she concern herself that he now has even more reason to avenge himself by abducting Shania (wherever she is – we’re not told)? No, she stays around for the karaoke and her character’s big payoff is that she gets out of her drab clothes into a gorgeous little blue number with matching strap shoes. This failure to follow through on the created circumstances is typical of the script.

Hurrell also plays another racial stereotype as the Japanese karaoke machine guy, but does better as his main character, Andy, the hall caretaker with a soft spot for Sharmaine. The script, however, offers no opportunity for this relationship to develop. He’s just joshed about it by the other women, who’ve seen something we haven’t, then it all turns out nice and predictably in the end with narry a challenge or twist to make it exciting.

Irene Wood turns in a good performance as Delma, the curmudgeonly grandma (of Norton and Harley), who turns out to be a dab hand, leg and foot at line dancing and hoe-down. Again there are umpteen possibilities for making the most of a character like this that are ignored by the writer.

When a playwright considers "what if?", they must follow through with "then what?" then ask themselves, "so what?" They stand or fall on their ability to turn obstacles into opportunities with creative flair. The children, for instance, are mentioned but never made real in the emotional lives of these women. While sayable dialogue is essential – and that can be said to be one strength of this play – there’s a lot more to wroughting a good play than that.

I have had my gripes with Alison Quigan et al’s plays in the past but they’re infinitely better crafted than The Fundraiser. And people have flocked to them. They’ve filled the coffers to fund more challenging works and one or two of them have been produced elsewhere. The market has spoken and who am I to argue with that?

I’ll be fascinated to see how The Fundraiser fares. Will the good people of Palmerston North realise they’re being sold a lemon or will they go like lemmings to the long-drop? If there is any justice it won’t see out its 6-week season and Palangi Loi, which only played two weeks, will return to full houses.

Toby Papazoglou’s local hall set is excellent and well lit by Laurie Dean. What a shame the environmental adventure house approach to the auditorium, through tiny tots’ art works, sets up a promise that isn’t fulfilled.
Bottom line: this birth was way too premature.

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