This musical play almost comes with its own built-in caution. “No one’s interested in other people’s grandchildren,” is an early line from George Henare’s Maurice to his wife Cath, performed by Lynda Milligan, in Roger Hall’s You Can Always Hand Them Back.

Consider yourself warned. Now it’s up to the story-tellers – the playwright and librettist, production team and actors to create that interest.

It really boils down to there possibly being two kinds of people in the audience: those who might be interested in other people’s grandchildren and those who might not; alternatively: those who are interested in catching grandparentinitis and those who are not.

Hall has taken a bit of a risk with this parlour musical – a risk with style rather than content.

Content-wise, You Can Always Hand Them Back is vintage Hall, this time dealing with middle class angst and perceptions at the ‘golden oldie’ end of life. It is almost a combination of Hall’s 2008 plays Who Needs Sleep Anyway? and Who Wants To Be 100?, plus singing,and is as familiar and comfortable as an old fluffy slipper.

Now, I am not a grandparent, but I could be, and there were enough people in the audience whose reactions made it plain they ‘got it’ – the expectations, the bewilderment, the heart-warming humour and sentimentality. There are puns and some clever one-liners, as well as the more obvious obliged-to-laugh gags with their set ups and punch-lines. 

Style-wise, YCAHTB is a mash-up of domestic drama, sit-com, social comment, music-hall, with a dash of burlesque. Skellern’s mostly whimsically framed songs are accompanied by Paul Barrett on Maurice and Cath’s own living-room upright piano.

An ever-present fly-on-the-wall observer, underscoring and punctuating scenes and situations, from time to time Barrett’s unnamed persona buzzes about the room, interposing himself chorus-like directly into proceedings.

What with breaking into song about their charismatic (or not) grandkids (some bordering on the mawkish), babysitting woes, hearing aids, technophobia, a bit of raunch, and a delightful a cappella Christmas song, the three performers are always conscious of themselves as story-tellers, dipping in and out of their golden oldie archetypes to sing, make asides or address the audience.

But what would the production have been like if it had been more stylised; if didn’t take place on a conventional living-room/bedroom combo set complete with the trappings of comfortable middle-class existence? Possibly more interesting.

It’s not that the singing or performances are inadequate; it is slick enough. It is certainly the kind of show that demands performers who have high levels of experience, versatility and skill, with Milligan and Henare making the most of the material and arrangements. And watching Henare’s transition into fragility is like being present at a masterclass in physical and vocal ageing. It’s just that the scenario maintains a tightly restricted focus that lacks much emotional dimension or depth. 

We learn little about Maurice and Cath other than their status as grandparents, and the comparatively minor confustications of ageing in an increasingly fast-moving and alien world.   

This family undergoes no real crises. One son moves his family offshore for a while, and there’s some niggle between Kath and her English daughter-in-law, but there’s no having to deal with relatively common social occurrences like divorce, broken family, abusive partner, family skeleton, accident, loss of a child, ADD or similar that could provoke dramatic edge.

There is the broadly telegraphed hint that their youngest grandson may be gay, and towards the end there’s a brief reflection on mortality. Otherwise it’s steady as she goes as the sun sinks slowly into the golden west, with nicely rounded outcomes.

What it means for a musical is there are no high moments to celebrate, console or empathise with in song. I found myself wishing that Hall’s first collaboration with Skellern, Kingsford-Brown’s first show as Centrepoint’s artistic director, and Henare’s first appearance at the theatre might have added up to something a little more profound.  

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Getting old is not a lot of laughs, and those there are can be fairly wry. As for getting seriously old, creeping Lear-like towards death … ah well.  

The upside of it, generally, can be enjoying the company of your grandchildren, in manageable-sized chunks of time. But if you’ve taken on baby-sitting, pushchair-pushing, or, later, child-minding for, maybe, days on end, it can be a scary responsibility, for each chunk. And there’s a fine line between happily being useful as part of the team, and being ruthlessly used (and then shut out).

Such are the two sides of this latest effort by Roger Hall, with the first half more concerned with the tricky functional roles of grandparenting, the second more with ageing. And it’s vintage Hall. He is, still, a sharp-eyed and adroitly articulate chronicler of aspects of urban middle class Kiwi lives, who gets things pretty much right. And manifestly, he had to move on somewhere from Who Wants To Be 100?, and this is it. 

Genre-wise, it’s more a drama, with humour and wit here and there, plus occasional music and singing, than an orthodox comedy. It deals with just one couple, in the second half of their lives, going on from worrying like hell about whether their son and daughter will get around to matching and hatching at all, to coping with the consequences. At times it moves along rather slowly, but that’s like life – getting through a day can take an awfully long time, and then it’s over, gone – and looking back, as one of the songs more-or-less says, it is strange how whole phases of life seem to have passed on so quickly. Children grow up, move away.

At the start, there is the domestic interior, in the couple’s house, and then in comes the pianist, who plays for a while, then sings, introducing the characters, the theme, the context. He will thereafter contribute bits of continuity, as expositor, and meta-theatrical interchanges with the characters/actors, and for one song, late on, come to centre-stage and join them. The two characters on first entry are old then, through remembering, shift to their younger selves, twenty to thirty years earlier, with the wife on the phone desperately urging her daughter to get the knot tied before the battery in her biological clock runs right down. The grandchildren, when on stage are invisible, which again makes for one-side-of-a-conversation business.

In this production, which counts as the World Premiere (!), the pianist/expositor role is carried with panache by Paul Barrett, who becomes a congenial presence, mostly in an intermediate position between the characters and the audience.

Securing an actor as distinguished and versatile as George Henare to play the grandfather is wonderful, and he makes the part his own, singing as well as he’s acting, with nothing overdone. (This is, implicitly, a Pakeha grandfather? Does it matter?)

Lynda Milligan, playing the grandmother, is another new presence at Centrepoint, as an actor who has had an impressive career, so far, at Christchurch’s Court Theatre. She handles the fluctuating emotions and the ageing equally surely, and, again, sings well.

This production counts as Jeff Kingsford-Brown’s first directing since he became the new Artistic Director at Centrepoint, and he has coped well, notably with the alternations between straight dramatic action and meta-theatrical twists, made easier, doubtless, with a gifted cast. One wonders whether there is scope for tweaking the pace slightly in one or two places.

Daniel Williams’ set, with some change to the dressing, serves equally well for the interiors of the couple’s house and of their retirement villa (and, briefly, of a hospital cubicle), with an absence of interior walls or doors.

The play is not perhaps Roger Hall at his very best, but it is still really good value. 

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