1950s New Zealand was in a moral ferment over the behaviour of teenagers. A new play about the intergenerational effects of that time has its world premiere at Arts Festival Dunedin next month, Charmian Smith reports.
In the 1950s, New Zealand was shocked by the behaviour of teenagers - juvenile delinquents, teddy boys, bodgies and widgies - and rock'n'roll.
The Parker-Hulme murder, the milk bar murder, the jukebox killing, the Petone incident and other violent events, as well as the sexual behaviour of teenagers, sparked a moral panic and the Mazengarb report into teenage sexuality resulted in the tightening of censorship laws, among other measures.
The bodgies and widgies of the '50s have their counterpart in the ''low-rider-trousers-bend-over-showing-the-crack-of-your-bum hoodies of today'', says Dunedin playwright and poet Sara McDougall.
Her play, Moon at the Bottom of the Garden, based on the jukebox killing of 1955 and its legacy, premieres at Arts Festival Dunedin in October at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
''Kids of a certain economic strata always have a uniform, so I really want to parallel the teens. They weren't terrible and ours aren't the worst,'' she said.
In Auckland, at Ye Olde Barn cafe, Albert (Paddy) Black stabbed 19-year-old Alan Jacques while he was selecting a song at the jukebox. It was over a girl and he was subsequently hanged for murder.
But it's not the story of the men that interested McDougall. It was the girl.
''I was interested in how might it be for a 16-year old who's had two boyfriends. One was knifed in front of her because she had it off with both of them, and it was over her, and the other one was hung for it,'' she said.
McDougall used transcripts of the trial and the actual names of those involved, but made it clear the play was a fiction, because she imagined the consequences of the event, which sparked off other events that repeated through the generations.
''I've created a family for her with repetition and secrets. Also, I wanted to have the young person inside the old one, so I created Rosie as young, and at 74 she's Nana Rose,'' McDougall said.
''To her grandchildren, especially, and her great-grandchildren she's this wondrously sweet kind lady. Her own daughter knows differently, and her young self constantly criticises her for other events that she's kept secret.''
McDougall's Rosie has a restrictive father who's a Jehovah's Witness, and she escapes through her bedroom window to go to the jukebox milk bar and to meet boys at the bottom of the garden with her friend Susie, a Maori-Chinese girl.
McDougall has created five generations of women, all of whom became teenage solo mothers. Some of them had their children taken off them and they all suffered addiction of one kind or another.
Dawn, Rosie's daughter, is a gambler; Rata, Dawn's daughter, was an addict who managed to escape and became a counsellor; her teenage daughter Lily is a P addict and also has a child. All had difficult relationships with their mothers but got on better with their grandmothers, she said.
She wanted to show how a tragedy affects those at the periphery and can reverberate down the generations.
''Hopefully, they can break the cycle with the surprise that happens at the end of the play. Most of it's about acceptance and forgiveness. You can beat yourself up all the time about the tragedy that happened, but hello! you were just a young girl when it happened, and stop berating yourself, which is basically what Nana Rose has been doing all her life.''
The title of the play comes from the name of a mah jong piece, a game they play on stage. Susie gave Rosie a mah jong set and it has become a family tradition to play it, McDougall said.
She wrote the play, and a dissertation on how and why she wrote it, for her MFA last year.
