People knew Rita Angus and Douglas Lilburn were friends but they'd never have believed they had an affair, playwright Dave Armstrong says.
"He was gay and she was a sort of a monastic celibate divorcee," he said in an phone interview from his home in Wellington.
Rita and Douglas, a play based on extracts from painter Rita Angus' letters to composer Douglas Lilburn, along with his music and images of her paintings, is part of the Otago Festival of the Arts next month.
When Lilburn died in 2001, Angus' letters to him were bequeathed to the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, and they have been used by Philip Norman and Jill Trevelyan in their respective biographies of Lilburn and Angus. With a dramatist's nose for a great story, Armstrong also read the letters and decided to write a play.
At first, he thought it would be fictional, then changed his mind.
"Since you've got the real letters, why not use them? Then I figured if you just hear from Rita, you only get one side of the story, but Douglas' letters to her were lost.
"Then I thought, his letters can be music."
Armstrong, a former musician, met Lilburn when he was a student at Victoria University.
He and some friends discovered, and gave the world premiere of, a brass quartet Lilburn had written but that had been rejected by the NZSO as being unplayable.
"It was about 1980 and I was a second-year student, and there we were meeting with the great man himself, and I got to know him - not very well.
"He was a very shy guy and I knew then he was New Zealand's most famous classical composer, and [he] probably still is," Armstrong said.
He, Ward-Leyland and director Conrad Newport selected sections of the letters to form the playscript.
"We are very faithful to the letters in that the content is all from Rita.
"Every word was written by Rita, though sometimes we'd only use part of a letter or link two letters together that had the same theme - she'd go off on a tangent quite a lot."
Then he, with Michael Houstoun and Newport, selected music, both well-known pieces and little-known works, that suited the mood of the letters.
"What's great is we were able to find corresponding pieces of music by Lilburn.
"They are not necessarily chronologically corresponding, but they are corresponding in mood.
"So, when Rita is down in Motueka relishing the pastoral landscape, there's a lot of music Lilburn would have written just after he met her that's very appropriate; it's got that lovely 1940s pastoral style," he said.
Some of his darker music fits with when she had a nervous breakdown and other resonances are specific, such as linking one of Lilburn's best-known piano works, From the Port Hills, with her letter about walking in the Port Hills with him.
In another letter, she refers to an allegro he played for her.
She was not only a fabulous painter but also a lover of music, dance and writing, and she was also prophetic, Armstrong said.
"She said, 'I know it's hard but you and I, Douglas, will one day be famous. You are a genius and there's only one genius in a million people.' A lot of what she said at the time would have been seen as egomaniac and unrealistic but ended up true.
"She said, 'You can't have this painting' - Cass, I think it was.' However, one day you'll be able to buy prints of my work and enjoy them.' For a painter to say that in the 1940s and early 1950s was, on one hand, unbelievably arrogant but on the other hand, incredibly perceptive, because she knew her genius and knew his."
The play is not a biography but the story of the relationship between the two, from their meeting in 1941 until her major breakdown in about 1953.
It does not cover the later part of their lives, when they remained good friends, Armstrong said.
Angus was a difficult person - she was a pacifist in the 1940s and refused to be manpowered during World War 2.
Lilburn, too, had a temper and did not suffer fools gladly.
"There are some very sad things, in parts. It's about New Zealand and our attitude to art and, in a way, the place of the artist in society, and it's a good eye into society in the 1940s," Armstrong said.
"It's a play I have a lot of emotional attachment to.
"It's a very poignant and serious play, but at the same time what I love about it is you just sit back and let it all wash over you, and see the beautiful paintings and hear the beautiful music and the words."
See it, hear It
Rita and Dougals, by Dave Armstrong, directed by Conrad Newman and featuring Jennifer Ward-Leyland and pianist Michael Houstoun, plays at the King's and Queen's Performing Arts Centre on October 5-7 as part of the Otago Festival of the Arts.
