Roger Hall’s “Taking Off”. Footloose and Free

Reviewed by Malcolm Calder

Taking Off

By Roger Hall

Tadpole Theatre Company

Pumphouse Theatre, Takapuna

Directed by Simon Prast

Production Teresa Sokolich

Lighting/Sound – Gareth/Geoff Evans

With: Jodie Dorday, Laura Hill, Rachel Nash, and Darien Takle

5-15 September 2024

Review By Malcolm Calder

I’ve written about Tadpole Theatre before.  This company has very clearly identified its audience demographic, has refined its offerings over time and continues to satisfy with a regular supply of quality work.  Tadpole doesn’t set out to showcase ‘new work’, nor to develop ‘new audiences ‘nor to fiddle around with dynamic pricing and other new-fangled tools.  Rather, it knows very clearly what its audience expects and then delivers. Roger Hall’s Taking Off is no exception. 

Originally written as radio series this work, perhaps echoed later in parts of his Four Flat Whites in Italy ten years later, Taking Off recounts the experiences of four middle-aged women who, each for her own reason, decides to take off to Mother England on singular OEs.  They have little in common, other than common urge, to get out and see the world and maybe revisit their own youth. There is little or no interraction between them and the four personas are carefully built through multiple snippet-by-snippet monologues that come thick and fast.  One is escaping a husband she finds boring and is out for a good time, another has discovered her husband is having an affair, a third is by nature compassionate and has faithfully tended her own husband prior to his death, while the fourth has been made redundant after a long career in the public service.

Rather surprisingly each seems intent on journalising her experience although, as Hall generously pointed out to the opening night audience, one of his impulses in writing Taking Off came from a friend who presented him with her own personalised diaries back in the day. 

Simon Prast has gathered a highly accomplished cast to wrap around Hall’s script and it would be unfair to single any one out from the rest.  They never interact with each other and the balance is pretty much right.  Each is a character that the audience knows well.  Laura Hill is the would-be novelist Ruth who probably lurks deep within each of us.  Rachel Nash plumbs more than a few emotional depths as Noeline and Darien Takle gives us an impishly delightful Jean that we can easily forgive for collecting tea towels.  Party girl Frankie made me cringe a bit but that probably says more about me and is more a credit to Jodie Dorday and an audience who loved and readily forgave her.

Arguably Taking Off perhaps had a little more currency when written 20 years ago but it still works today.  The result is an interesting play, that may seem a tiny bit dated in parts, but only minimally so.  I found the first act a little long and a couple of the monologues could have been lopped off.  Contrapuntally eventual resolution for each of the four seemed a little too neat, and came perhaps too quickly. After all that is what an OE is all about.

Today the OE is probably even more cliched part of the kiwi life-experience and has become part of our social history.  It certainly resonated well with Tadpole’s boomer-based audience at the Pumphouse who related to it very well indeed.  So, if you are after a light-hearted night out with plenty of laughs and maybe a shred of nostalgia, Taking Off comes highly recommended.