Who Wants to be 100, this story about four old codgers in a rest home, really resonated with the audience, which is what Roger Hall does better than anyone.

This production is directed by Ross Jolly and starring Ray Henwood who probably know more about staging Roger’s work than anyone else in the country.  As ever, Roger Hall intertwines comedy with the thought provoking, in this case notably a resentful rest home attendant who harms the patients. 

Henwood plays a lawyer who’s admitted himself to the home, the others though are not happily there – Alan (George Henare) has Alzheimer’s and desperately wants to return to his pottery. Leo (an unrecognisable Peter Hambleton) is a former All Black who is the life and soul of the rest home but who is estranged from his daughters, while poor old Charles (Ken Blackburn) is silenced and deeply frustrated by a stroke. 

We meet two of the wives, both of whom are dealing with their decisions in different ways, and both played by Jane Waddell – who just needs to accentuate their differences.  Jude Gibson gets to play a variety of roles, from the caring Sarah Elaine to the busty Gloria to the nasty Sharon.

Hall fans, though they may as I did find the first half far too long, won’t be disappointed.

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I’ve given up waiting for Roger Hall to get back to writing another play that sustains the unities of time, place and action without resorting to direct address to introduce his characters.

The fact is he has made an art form of getting characters to tell their back-stories in expositional monologues that entertain, in after-dinner speaker style. And it works: long season with full houses of happy customer attest to that. So why should he set himself the task of weaving such information into ‘present action’ sequences, they way most playwrights do?

One way or another, whatever our own age, home truths about aging do emerge to give us pause during Who Wants to be 1oo? (anyone who’s 99) – an answer I and some of his characters would dispute, by the way, because it depends on your states of health and wellbeing, both physical and mental.

George Henare and Ray Henwood have been co-habiting in plays about old men for almost a year now: Heroes at Circa, in which they were joined by Ken Blackburn; I’m Not Rappaport at Downstage; Who Wants to be 100? with the ATC … Meanwhile Blackburn did Who Wants to Be 100 at The Court, and now the inimitable triumvirate is together again in this Circa production, reviving their already-established roles.

Henwood is Edwin Davis, the silver-tongued ex-barrister who has yet to confront the erosion of his capacity for magnanimity.  Henare is the highly sexed Coromandel potter of some repute, Alan Webster, whose creeping Alzheimer’s keeps his daily encounters fresh. Blackburn dwells in the benignly frustrated world of stroke-victim Charles Benson, once a history professor, now unable to articulate his thoughts, feelings and memories to anyone but us, the audience.

For my money the play would be stronger – more interestingly perceptive and poignant – if Charles were the only narrator but no, everyone gets a go and the audience is happy with that, it seems to make things easier all round …

Peter Hambleton, who last year played Baby P in the Downstage production of Roger and Pip Hall’s Who Needs Sleep Anyway, is ex-All Black Leo, the fourth aging inmate we get to know of the many in the single men’s wing of this branch of the Regina Rest Homes franchise.

All four nail their characters with practised aplomb, playing their gags impeccably, touching our hearts with their private pain, finding the pathos that underpins good social comedy.

Jude Gibson, who plays four care-giver characters, and Jane Waddell, who plays two wives and a daughter of three of the men, both appeared in Circa’s Jack and Beanstalk and Waddell was also in Who Needs Sleep Anyway. With their roles being to support and challenge the men so that we get to know them better, they necessarily have less dimension and fewer opportunities to win our empathy.

In the performance I saw (the first Sunday matinee), Gibson laid Elaine, the Rest Home administrator, on with an unsubtle towel to begin with but as her pragmatic awareness of life’s realities kicked in (e.g. the board’s main interest is in making profits, not caring for the elderly), her points were made less frenetically. The rest are clearly drawn archetypes: Debbie, the ditzy nurse with a heart of gold until she’s betrayed; Sharon the bitter and twisted abusive night nurse who stays employed because the pay and conditions in this sector are too poor to attract better people; Gloria, the ebullient activities leader whose patience also gets sorely tested.

Waddell finds true understanding in her roles. Alan’s wife Sarah is unable to cope with his Alzheimer’s but happily accepts his philandering (an especially delicious scene with Henare and Gibson’s Elaine). Charles’ wife Audrey, with her faculties intact, necessarily moves on from focusing all her love on the shell of the man her husband once was. Mary, Leo’s estranged daughter, married and living in Queensland, epitomises the dysfunctional result of having a father whose love of his game was greater than anything else.

While Edwin and Leo are largely the authors of their own non-medical fates, Charles and Alan are victims of relatively random circumstance. The inevitability of death is not ignored and I would challenge anyone not to be moved by Blackburn’s exquisite rendering of ‘Abide With Me’.

This Ross Jolly-directed production of Who Wants to be 1oo? is funny, insightful and finally moving. It delivers.
 

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Old age is not funny but Roger Hall is determined to make us laugh as well as cry at it in Who wants to 100? From the reactions of a largely elderly Sunday matinee audience I’d say he definitely succeeded. It’s close to the bone but mostly the funny one.

Following his now regular prescription of taking a cross-section of New Zealand stereotypes and providing them with brief story lines, Roger Hall has also given them topical one-liners, jokes, comic sketches, opportunities to talk directly to the audience and comment on the action, running gags, the occasional sharp social observation, some good old-fashioned tear jerking moments as well as an equal share of the limelight.

The play follows four male residents of the Regina Rest Home as they cope with the problems of age (bowels, bladder, memory, family, lack of sex, etc) each other, the overworked, underpaid staff, and the deadly routine of the home.

Edwin (Ray Henwood) was a wealthy silver-tongued lawyer; Leo (Peter Hambleton) was an All Black; stroke victim Charles (Ken Blackburn) was a history professor from the UK and is able to talk to the audience but only mumble to the others; and Alan (George Henare), a potter from the Coromandel, is placed by his wife in the home because he is suffering from Alzheimers.

The staff and the men’s relatives are played by the quick-changing Jane Waddell and Jude Gibson. The nurses are portrayed as either vicious, or not very bright, or smoothly competent but not caring, while the inner thoughts of the relatives reveal a similar indifference, even callousness, towards the men.  

All the actors slip sleekly into their characters with professional aplomb, but only George Henare as Alan seems not to be acting but existing in a wilderness of his own. After his performance, particularly in his opening scene, and remembering Gary Henderson’s moving Home Land at Circa last year, it’s hard to accept the overt theatricality of the pain of old age in Who wants to 100?
 

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