Helen Clark play comes to the Pumphouse

From the Listener is a run down of a play currently touring New Zealand and now at the Pumphouse on Auckland's North Shore, where I live coincidentally.


It looks like it might be quite a good show and you will probably see me there. Buy Tickets

In 2005, before the last election, essayist Richard Meros used that intrigue as the founding block from which to build a discourse on such topics as Rogernomics, gender studies and bodily fluids. He called the philosophical and satirical result On the Conditions and Possibilities of Helen Clark Taking Me as Her Young Lover. Then, in 2007, mindful of the next election and with funding from Creative New Zealand (thus indirectly from the arts minister herself), actor Arthur Meek and director Geoff Pinfield mined that essay for dramatic possibilities – and struck gold when their one-man show premiered at Bats Theatre in Wellington in January this year.


On the Conditions is now touring nationally. In it, Meek plays Meros, presenting his essay as a PowerPoint-aided lecture and trying to convince us: a) that Clark must take a young lover to ensure her political survival; b) that Clark’s acquisition of a young lover will benefit the country; and c) that he, Richard Meros, between whose brown wool vest and brown tweed trousers exists a certain chemistry, should be that young lover. (The latter conclusion bringing a spontaneous applause from the near-capacity audience on the night I attended.)


Meros, furthermore, intends the tour of his lecture to bring him to Clark’s attention, so that he can gain the proximity necessary for him to persuade her to take him as her young lover.

Absurd. Brilliant. Delightful.

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c Political Animal 2008