Wild Bees: A play about Rogernomics timed for election week

Wild Bees by Phil Ormsby
A Flaxworks Production
Directed by Stuart Devenie
The Basement September, 16-20

A new play opens next week at The Basement, which must be topical as it is said to contain bad language and dirty politics. As one of the characters says, “Any idiot can balance the books by selling the f**king furniture. Piss away the country’s assets on the stock market.”

The play is set in 1991 in a corporate conference room in Wellington. As $23 billion of New Zealand assets are sold to the highest bidder and labour laws are rewritten, a union team renegotiates their contract with a company after it is sold offshore. Polite tolerance between the parties turns to name-calling and petty-point scoring across the negotiating table before finally descending into betrayal, threats and illegal acts.

It is Animal Farm meets 12 Angry Men with a giant dose of The Daily Show. Playwright Phil Ormsby says his play has been developing for almost 20 years before he finally decided on a date for its premiere: Election week 2014.

“I’m always amazed at how little this period in New Zealand’s history is talked about. It was such a watershed time; Rogernomics, the Employment Contracts Act, Asset Sales. It radically altered New Zealand’s history. With the election looming, why not remind ourselves?”

The play is based on the playwright's own experiences around the negotiating table in the 1980s and 1990s.

“Wild Bees is based on my own experiences” says Ormsby, “as a union delegate in a newly privatised, ex-state sector company attempting to renegotiate employment conditions under the newly passed Employment Contracts Act. If I needed a reminder of how much has changed since then, I got it at the first workshop of the play as younger cast members struggled to get their heads around such concepts as zero unemployment, a government job that meant a job for life, weekends off and award rates not to mention an entire archaic lexicon of 80’s buzzwords.

"My memory of the period is that the speed and audacity of the changes bordered on the surreal and Stuart and the cast have brilliantly captured that in a production which veers from tragedy to farce sometimes in the space of a few seconds”. “I remember talking with people at the time, saying this should be a movie, people won’t believe it” says Ormsby.

“And while not everything in the play is true, there are elements of truth in even the most strange and farcical moments.”

It’s also a big step for Flaxworks, as a theatre company, whicho until now have always produced original small scale plays; “Nine cast members!” says Alex Ellis says Flaxworks producer and performer “The biggest cast we’ve ever had until now has been two so this is a huge leap for us but it’s also a lot of fun. We have a great cast, all fantastic actors and Stuart Devenie in the director’s chair. It really is a dream come true for us.” 

Stuart Devenie says that in the broader political events of the past month in New Zealand, the play has become more relevant. “When I read the first draft of Wild Bees about four months ago, it made me laugh out loud. This is always a good sign in a comedy. The script is deeply grounded in Phil’s own experience as a union negotiator and has an increasingly rare delight in a new New Zealand script, a large cast. The nine characters are all expertly drawn and we’ve been extremely lucky to have formed an expert company to perform it. The tensions between and within the union and management teams as they attempt to negotiate their way through the then uncharted waters of the 1991 Employment Contracts’ Act are both trenchant and hilarious.”

The cast are Donogh Rees, Kevin Keys, Alistair Browning, Wesley Dowdell, Emma Newborn, Damien Avery, Alexander Campbell, Jordan Blaikie and Alex Ellis.