Weathering well

The Court Theatre opens its new playhouse with The End of the Golden Weather, in a production featuring a cast member with a long connection to the New Zealand classic. BY SARAH CATHERALL

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Ian Mune was in his first job out of school and a part-time amateur actor when he heard about a solo play packing out theatres. The now 83-year-old, who was knighted last year, pushed his way into an Auckland theatre and stood at the back.

“A man came on stage and he said, ‘I invite you to join me on a journey into the past, into that territory of the heart that we call childhood,” Mune recalls. “I closed my eyes, and I kept my eyes closed all the way through it because it was so gripping.”

That man was Bruce Mason acting in his play The End of the Golden Weather, which over the years became a seminal piece of New Zealand theatre. One of our most celebrated playwrights, Mason died in 1982 aged 61, after performing his best-known work more than 500 times. The play connected Mune and Mason over the years. When Mason helped set up Wellington's Downstage Theatre in the early 1960s, Mune was one of its first employed actors. He would go in and hold Mason's scripts and help him prepare his lines.

Mune: “I made a couple of suggestions about moves he could make to intensify the thing and Bruce would say, ‘Oh, yes.’ Every time that Downstage was going to go broke and going to close, they'd give Bruce a ring and say, ‘Can you do two weeks of Golden Weather?’ because they knew it would pack the theatre every night. And he would. He saved the theatre two or three times a year for a few years.”

After Mune began writing and directing for the screen, he suggested to Mason the play would make a fine film. Could they co-write a script? After Mason's death, Mune asked his widow, Diana Mason, if he could continue with those plans. “It was made in Bruce's honour,” says Mune, of the 1991 film he directed and wrote.

Now, The End of the Golden Weather is back in Mune's life. He's the narrator of the Court Theatre's production in its new Christchurch home.