Hart to Hart

The latest actors to play one of playwright Sir Roger Hall's most enduring characters compare notes on being men alone, on stage.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

Dickie Hart first came to life on stage nearly 30 years ago in C’mon Black, a play inspired by Roger Hall's visit to South Africa among a party of All Black supporters for the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Upon his return and thinking the team’s defeat in the notorious final had killed his idea for a play about the jaunt, Hall wrote a piece for the Listener about being there. But writing that story inspired C'mon Black, a solo show featuring Dickie, the rugby-fanatic cow cockie easing into retirement who finds on his travels that the outside world is a complicated place.

With Timothy Bartlett in the role, it premiered at Dunedin's Fortune Theatre. Dozens of Hall's plays had been the box office lifeblood of the southern company until it foundered in 2018.

But it was a Wellington actor, the late Grant Tilly, who played many Hall characters on stage and screen, who picked up the C'mon Black ball and ran with it. He toured the play all around in New Zealand and took it to London. He got the benefit of Hall editing the monologue after its Dunedin debut. “Good friends told me the script was too long and too preachy, so I hacked a lot out of it,” Hall tells the Listener.

Back then, Hall wasn't thinking there would be a Dickie Hart trilogy - “Hard enough to look ahead to the end of the play”. But now there is.

You Gotta Be Joking debuted in 2013 and had Hart and wife Glenda shifting to a townhouse in Wellington. And now End of Summer Time, in which the couple have moved to Auckland - the one place Dickie said he'll never live - to be near their grandkids.

When the new play starts - it’s set between 2019 and 2023 when Dickie is in his early 70s - they, like Hall, are living in an apartment near Takapuna Beach. But that’s as close to home as the latest work gets to its author.

“There are often many parallels between me and my characters. Move along; nothing to read into this.”