The December Brother

“SEEyD has delivered again. If this doesn’t provide you with conversation starters over drinks afterwards, you’re brain-dead” The Hutt News

 

"Tim Spite is a true theatre artist. He draws inspiration from what in his own life, family, community, country and world prods his inquisitiveness, concerns and passions, then he forms development and production units to create plays that could not happen any other way... A richly layered work of extraordinary substance." Theatreview

"It is a very well thought out and clever play. The actors did a brilliant job, with all playing various characters within one Act. There were no costume changes, just the sudden switch to another character.. If you like thought provoking theatre, I recommend checking this one out." WotzOn.com

Where do you come from? What are your roots and how do they define who you are?

In her thirties, Rebecca is told she was adopted. She decides to track down her birth family but what she finds are murdered relatives, a sibling in jail, two sides to a story and no idea who to believe.

This is the thrilling final act of The December Brother as Tim Spite (SEEyD) brings two true stories into sharp contrast. That of his own father’s search for his birth family at a time when David Bain was accused of killing his.

The makers of Paua and Turbine return with a theatrical tour de force that asks if we can ever know who we really are.

Photos by Philip Merry

 “SEEyD has produced some of the best original works of the theatre of the past 10 years and, going on Spite’s record, there’s a good chance that this could be the play of the year. ”
The Dominion Post

“SEEyD is a company truly doing the hard work of forging relevant, thought-provoking and most importantly original New Zealand theatre."
Capital Times

From the makers of Paua and Turbine.

Producer: Stuart McKenzie 
Director: Tim Spite

Written By:  Emma Kinane, Brad McCormick, Nikki McDonnell,
Tim Spite, Tony Spite, Hadleigh Walker

Lighting Design:  Jen Lal
Sound Design: Gil Eva Craig
Production  Manager: Nathan McKendry
Stage Manager: Sonia Hardie 
Coordinator: Colleen McColl

Interview with Tim Spite by Angela Green

Tim, you are the creative genius behind SEEyD…

Not really – the group is the creative genius behind SEEyD.  I’m the one that has the initial ideas and does a bit of organizing and pulls people together.

How do you manage the task of directing, acting in and devising the show?

It’s fine as long as I’ve got enough time and we’re not under pressure to come up with a play within five weeks.  We’ve got 3 months so I can do all those other things. 

All the thinking really happens away from rehearsals.  For me it’s like 5.30 in the morning; I wake up, I can’t stop thinking about it.  But that is useful time and I can come back the next morning and say “I’m the director, this is what I’ve thought about”.  The time away from the rehearsal room is more important than the time in.

How did the idea of exploring the two stories come into fruition?  A thunderbolt strike?

I have lots of thunderbolt ideas but most of them get discarded after a day or two when you’ve had time to mull them over.  This one kept sticking.

I had [it] over a year ago now…The retrial was happening at the same time I was thinking what am I gonna do? I was talking to dad about his amazing story that he’d written - his amazing memoir - and I thought ‘what about if we take those two radical ideas’.  

It really was as simple as thinking ‘imagine if dad had found that he was related to…there’s David Bain on the television, well yeah, what about that?  Here’s something that intrigues me, this is something that gets my creative juices going. 

With David Bain - everyone’s got an opinion about it and …people know [not] much more than scant details released by the media and yet they’ve got such strong dogmatic opinions and that’s such a NZ thing…  and it’s about family and dad’s story’s about family.  So they just sort of matched even though they had this wonderful polarity.

The first act tells your dad’s story, the second reenacts the Crown and Defense case for the Bain murders, and the third act is fictional.  Tell us about the third act?

It is a story about an adopted woman looking for her family - a similar situation to my dad’s – only she does find that she’s related to someone, who like David Bain is accused of murdering his family.  Dad had that anxiety when he was looking for his family. He always harbored that concern that he might be related to some dysfunctional family.

I felt like investigating that, and that was the model for bringing the two stories together.  Let’s try and make a story that’s kind of about both of these things.  Working on it has been this nice revelation of themes and ideas about family and our identity as New Zealanders as well.

Often SEEyD shows have had a great deal of humour around some controversial themes.  Is this the case for The December Brother?

This is probably the most serious one that we’ve done but it’s also the most intriguing.  This is the first show where I think “shit there’s not a dull moment in this”. There hasn’t been a great intention to make it funny but there is humour, and it comes incidentally as it does in life. 

It’s not about writing a gag line.

What’s next for SEEyD?

I’ve a grant to do another show coming up about tagging.  I’m interested in Bruce Emery’s story.  He’s the one who stabbed Pihema Cameron for tagging his fence or his garage or something.  And he chased him down the street and there was a scuffle. He was acquitted of murder but he got manslaughter charges. He’s in prison. I don’t think it was intentional.

He should never have been chasing a guy with a knife but they let him off murder [charges] and I think that’s a really telling sign, as a nation and a community, of our complete contempt for these kids that are writing on our fences, and drug culture. It is a really sad indictment of our care for our children.

It’s packed with interesting material that can be explored theatrically. Again it’s an issue with two sides.  You’ve got one side that says that guy should be locked up for murder and … the other that says...it’s really racial too. 

There was actually a case in New York where a [white] guy shot four black guys on a train who were trying to mug him. They were asking for money.  He just turned around and pulled a gun and shot them and he was acquitted of murder. And I think it’s like a litmus test of how the community’s feeling at the time.  You get a verdict that’s manslaughter at that time because they’re sick to death of those kids ruining our community.

It is really interesting political material around how you deal with [societal and racial] problems.

Interview with Hadleigh Walker, Brad McCormick, Nikki McDonnell by Angela Green

What is it like working on the project?
Hadleigh:  It’s the longest I’ve ever worked on a theatre show. It’s been a fascinating experience..  

We’ve done a lot of improvising but also a lot of writing, so we’re all on our laptop writing scenes,  reading them out, tweaking and things, which I quite enjoy.  It’s been a nice mixture of rehearsing a script, writing a script, improvising stuff.

Nikki:  Right from day one we started improvising and finding out what characters were there, or possible storylines.  Then we wrote it down or recorded it so even if we don’t use it we’ve got a record of it.

The first show I did [with SEEyD] was SaND.  We improvised but Tim would go away and write the things. Now he delegates, lets us go home and write some scenes. 

Tell me about the show
Brad: I remember Tim saying on the phone when he first pitched it to me that it was about truth…whether it’s a story about finding your dad ( which is almost an anecdote) or whether it’s a quintuple murder and how things get distorted in terms of memories and second hand information and other people weighing in with their opinion on what actually happened.

Hadleigh:  Even before we started rehearsal you’d  bring the conversation up with workmates and people have an opinion[about the Bain case].  And that’s what we looked at in rehearsals, the debate around that, different people’s logic – I’ve had some really good fun improvising scenes [about] hearsay … it’s fascinating enacting  someone who’s formed a really strong opinion based on a couple of [other] people’s information. 

The second act is a reenactment of the Bain family murders using the Crown’s case, and then the case for the Defence.  How did you find working with this subject matter?
Brad:  Sometimes you’re breaking it down into things in terms of choreography then you just sit back and you think about how grim it actually is, and you think about that family, it was actually a very horrific event.

Tell me about some of the characters you play?
Hadleigh:  The biggest challenge for me is playing David Bain I just love [playing] the breadth of emotion the character has to go through.  What it would be like?  It’s horrific and really hard to fathom.  It’s a big challenge to go from alleged killer to alleged victim in such a short time and to see how vast a difference it is.

Brad:  I play Steven. I get strangled with my own T shirt, which is from an acting point of view not a great deal of fun.

We’ve tried to recreate it as best we think it might have gone down.  At the end he [Steven] was really fighting for his life. I find that really sinister that he knew who killed him.  He knows.

Is this your first experience with Downstage?
Brad:  This is my Wellington stage debut.  I saw Skin Tight [Gary Henderson, 2004]at Downstage and loved it.  And the [Lonesome] Buckwhips’ last gig.  I’m a fan of theirs.

Nikki:  I love the Downstage space, it’s so familiar. The last play I did with Tim was Paua.

So much has happened for me lately…Two children!  I have a one year old and one who’s four so that takes a huge amount of time, but also it was a real head shift away from acting.