Play to celebrate Plunket Centenary

Media Release
22 March 2007

Play to celebrate Plunket Centenary

Award-winning playwright Roger Hall and his daughter Pip Hall today (subs Thursday 22 March) announced details of their first playwriting
collaboration, which has been commissioned by the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society.

“Who Needs Sleep Anyway?”, a play to celebrate Plunket’s centenary, premieres at the Fortune Theatre in Dunedin on 4 May, tours South Island centres, before opening in Wellington in July at Downstage.

Plunket’s New Zealand President, Kaye Crowther, said with around 90 percent of Kiwis able to claim they are Plunket babies, “Who Needs Sleep Anyway?” will have wide appeal.

“It’s our 100th birthday and what better way to share this occasion than through an entertaining evening that will appeal to anyone who’s known the joys and perils of parenthood. It is an opportunity to celebrate one hundred years of caring for children in New Zealand.

“The play is fun and will no doubt send Kiwi families in search of their Plunket books recalling those memorable milestones and comments made by
their Plunket Nurse,” she said.

As a Plunket father of two, Roger Hall has his fair share of memories of the Plunket Nurse visiting and these, along with daughter Pip’s experiences as a Plunket mother of two, have given the playwrights first-hand experience for this satirical look at bringing up children.

“We have delved into the history of Plunket - its colorful creator, Sir Truby King, and the nursing service he founded. And we’ve also explored
modern themes – parenting today and the ups and down that brings. There’s also a giant, wise-cracking baby that holds the whole show together. It should be heaps of fun”, says Pip Hall, a film and television writer and actor.

The final comment goes to Roger Hall … “Writing a play is a bit like bringing a child into this world. In this case, I was involved in the gestation period,
and Pip was the one who slapped it into life,” he says.

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WHO NEEDS SLEEP ANYWAY?
By Roger and Pip Hall

“Who Needs Sleep Anyway?” is a show commissioned by Plunket to celebrate their centenary.

Meet Baby P, a giant wise-cracking baby with attitude. From the moment he’s born until he’s off to school at the age of five, he takes us on a journey about the trials and tribulations of what it’s really like to be a baby. From first smile, first tooth, first steps through the terrible twos, toilet training, tantrums, and out the other side, Baby P entertains us with his frank and flippant commentary of what it really means to be a baby in the 21st century.

Meet Polly and Paddy, the overtired, well-meaning parents of Baby P. We track the ups and downs of being a first time Mum and Dad. Will their hopes and dreams of being new parents be met? Will they ever get another good night’s sleep? Will they ever have sex again? Through Polly and Paddy we explore the joys and hardships that every new parent goers through with heart and humour.

Meet Nurse Daisy, a Plunket nurse from a bygone era. Scarily strict and severe, she explores the Plunket milestones over the last one hundred years – the development of the Plunket nurse, the Karitane movement, car seats, fundraising, immunization, well- child checks, Plunket line, and that iconic record of baby’s progress, The Plunket Book.

And lastly, the man who gave life to Plunket. Meet Sir Truby King. The life and times of the man himself, his hard-working wife Bella, a hobbyhorse and several pet lambs. From humble beginnings in Dunedin through his tireless campaigning for children’s welfare to the only private citizen ever to be given a state funeral, Sir Truby is one of the most colourful characters from New Zealand’s history.

Narrated by a giant baby and an old fashioned Plunket nurse, “Who Needs Sleep Anyway?” is a fun filled evening of fun, frivolity, hysterics and history, songs and satire, as we celebrate one hundred years of bringing up children in New Zealand.

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ROGER HALL
Roger Hall was born in England in 1939 and emigrated to NZ in 1958.
He first worked for State Insurance, later working as a teacher and editor with the Education Dept before winning the Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago in 1977.
Hall’s earliest scripts were for television, but in 1976 he wrote his first stage play Glide Time (opened at Circa Theatre) which helped establish him as New Zealand’s best known and most commercially successful playwright. Many successful play productions followed including Middle Age Spread, By Degrees, Market Forces, C’Mon Black, Dirty Weekends, Social Climbers, The Book Club, You’ve Gotta Be Joking!, A Way of Life, Take a Chance on Me, Spreading Out and Taking Off together with musicals, pantomimes, radio dramas, books and plays for children and comedy series for television, most notably, Gliding On and Market Forces. His latest work, Who Wants to be a Hundred? opens in Auckland later this year.
His plays have been performed in ten other countries, the most successful being Middle Age Spread which ran in London’s West End for 15 months and won the award for Comedy of the Year.
Roger Hall was awarded a QSO and the Turnovsky Prize in 1987, the 1996 Katherine Mansfield Fellowship for study in Menton, and Hon Doctorate of Literature from Victoria University, 1996, and in 2003 he was made a Companion of the NZ Order of Merit (CNZM).
PIP HALL

Pip has worked as a full time writer since 1995, after graduating from the University of Otago with a degree in Drama.

She has written eight plays as well as co-written and devised half a dozen more. Pip is currently working on a CNZ funded project A Woman Who Loved A Mountain which was pitched at the Show & Tell for the International festival late last year. Since then, it has been picked up for a rehearsed reading at the Taranaki Festival and Michael Hurst is directing a production in Auckland 2008.

Pip is also collaborating with her father, Roger, on a commissioned work to celebrate the Plunket Centenary in 2007. Who Needs Sleep Anyway is premiering at the Fortune in Dunedin as part of the centenary celebrations. It later tours the South Island, while in July it opens at Downstage in Wellington.

Her one act play Shudder was published by The Play Press and is widely produced in high schools through out the country.

Pip also works extensively in television and film as a writer, story liner, story/script editor,actor and creative producer. Pip is married with two children and lives in Auckland.

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