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Alan Bruntonrecollections |
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A brief history of derangement and enterprise: Alan Brunton. Writer. Performer. 1946-2002 New Zealand Listener (3
August 2002), 56-57 I leave to you these things, this
The
fuzzy boy in dark glasses is me. The music hall George Harrison is Russell
Haley. We are both alive, and we met up recently together with Russell’s
wife Jean and talked, laughed and wept for a long time about the scrawny ghost
whose trousers are coming apart, who is Alan Brunton, and who is now dead. The
photograph is now filled with terrible grief and dismay because Alan died when
his wonderful hale voice and the fabulous imagination that spoke with it
should have gone on rattling the cage of language for years more. But the
photograph is also a treasure because it reminds us that our lives and those
of many others were changed because they met Alan. I am going to write about
some of those meetings as a way of remembering our old friend, knowing that
not everything happened to us and that others knew Alan longer and more
intensely, especially his wife and workmate Sally and his daughter Ruby. In
1969 a small gang of us travelled to Wellington. We took a play by Russell
Haley – The Adoration of Za’oud – and we read poems. Alan’s
contribution was to demand an event driven by the exhilaration of completely
incautious imagination, and direct engagement with the audience. Riding
shotgun on this stampede was another Alan, an intuitive impresario. This
combination of derangement and enterprise was my first lesson from him, and it
did wonders for my life thereafter. If I thank him for this at the outset, the
rest just follows. In 1971 Alan turned up at our place in London. He was
yellow and skinny after months in India, but at once entered the city with an
irrepressible homing instinct for its resources. Alan loved big cities,
especially New York and Amsterdam, and among his survival skills was fearless
gregariousness. Back
in New Zealand a few years later we scraped a survival together around the
early activities of Red Mole Theatre and its sidekick White Rabbit Puppet
Theatre. Touring with Alan, you got to see several things. One was his
uncompromising belief in a gleeful life of the imagination, at once
improvisatory and shrewd. Another was his belief that the esoteric was not the
preserve of clerics, but enriched the stories, beliefs and symbols of all
lives. Another was his engagement, ferocious and sentimental by turns, with
all kinds of audiences, from small-town kids through to
quasi-professional theatre crowds. Entering a small town, Alan would
engage locals in bantering conversation, glean items of local lore and
scandal, and spike the shows with them. He had a canny ability to scandalise
and charm at the same time, to make mundane gossip about the local bigwig the
surprise twist in some fabulous yarn. During
those years we also produced a tabloid newspaper, Spleen. It came to an
end after eight issues when, drumming up advertising revenue, I found myself
following the smooth wake of Peter Webb, who was launching Art New Zealand,
a more compelling enhancer of brand values. Alan let Spleen go without
looking back. Lesson: when it’s over, it’s over. The
Moles went on to New York, New Mexico and Amsterdam, and I lost contact,
except when I stayed at Alan and Sally’s place on Avenue C and 9th in New
York City for some weeks in 1983. The Lower East Side had not yet been
gentrified, and a vast, anarchic, diverse underground washed in and out of the
black and Latino boho. This was Alan’s natural habitat, and in it he also
discovered another natural milieu, community activism at street-level. Back in
New Zealand 10 years later, he made a bloody nuisance of himself over Erskine
College in Island Bay, delaying the sale of the historic building by several
years – during which he and Sally used the space for rehearsal. He
contributed his bloody-mindedness to the Island Bay Surf Club – which they
also used for rehearsal and performance. Shortly
before the Moles went off to New York again in 1981, Alan and I organised State
of the Nation, a ramshackle touring show with a pickup band consisting of
Bruno Lawrence on drums, alto sax, and calming vibes, Bill Gruar on bass, and
a maniacal Wilton Rodger on guitar and anything else we couldn’t stop him
getting hold of. The poets were David Mitchell, Alan and myself. We referred
to it as a merciful last rites for the male-dominated ‘young New Zealand
poets’ of the 60s and 70s. We
were a decade on from Za’oud, some of us had kids, Alan’s support
for Sally’s work was uncompromising, devoted and full of pride, and he would
become an extraordinary parent. He never patronised kids, he knew that the
best thing they had going for them was esoteric imaginative play, and on his
daughter Ruby’s account he made a bloody nuisance of himself once again over
city council attempts to ‘rationalise’ library services. I
was involved in a Playmarket workshop weekend in Nelson where Alan was running
masterclasses, moving ideas into production. I sat in on a class and watched a
patient, respectful mentor work with inexpert optimists, without condescension
or sarcasm. The Alan I knew, enjoyed and understood best often turned
courtliness into mockery, and served up most of his judgments with an acerbic
twist of irony. He was one of the funniest men I ever met when he wasn’t
performing, and one of the best comedians when he was. He was a great
debunker. Despite this, I heard a lot about his work as mentor with younger
musicians and performers. One of these has been his and Sally’s daughter,
Ruby, herself a gifted playwright. My
last contact with Alan was vicariously with this generous mentor. I went to
the Wellington High School Shakespeare Club’s 2002 production of Love’s
Labour’s Lost. It was directed by Ruby Brunton and the production notes
thanked Alan ‘for his help’. There were possible signs of this help in the
choreography, the stagecraft (hat and cane routines) and the full-on sexual
burlesque. But it was in the voice coaching of the young actors that I last
met my dear friend. What they had learnt, from Ruby through Alan, was that
they were speaking poetry. You could hear the measure and timing of it, the
elegant swivel of wit around a line-ending, the economical tread of the
monosyllabic language, the entire play of language raised above the banality
of mere meaning. The word was freed at Wellington High School in June
2002. I
wish I’d seen Sally and Alan’s last performance, Grooves of Glory,
at The Space in Newtown – I hear they were great. I wish I’d seen more of
Alan over the past few years – we were both ‘too busy’. I wish I’d
bought several copies of all the Bumper Books he published in one of his last
enterprises. I wish I’d said goodbye before they went off on his last tour
to Europe. What
I’m sure of is that Alan’s work as a poet, his long collaboration with
Sally, and the Moles’ diverse theatre work, will shortly become revalued,
and we will acknowledge that Alan Brunton was one of New Zealand’s greatest
and most free-spirited poets and performers. I acknowledge here that he taught
me more than I could ever admit at the time, but thank him for now. Dear
belligerent, generous, laughing ghost, rest in peace. Ian Wedde Wellington
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