We’re in a DOC hut in the middle of nowhere for Theatre Hawke’s Bay’s season of Social Climbers: National candles, bungee washing line, enamel pots and a stag skull. The intentions book.

Roger Hall has been writing New Zealand national identity for fifty years and whenever a play of his opens, anywhere in the country, the audience breathes out a collective sigh of “Ahhh that’s us!”. Part nostalgia, part romantic myth, we recognise ourselves and the thin threads of something akin to a New Zealand culture.

The set builders at Theatre Hawke’s Bay are mentioned only in the small print of the programme, but so often they have a starring role. They manage to take a neighbourhood theatre of humble size and turn it into a character in its own right. 

With Social Climbers that means this back country hut, where the whole play takes place. The arc of bunks, the stools and obligatory ‘everything’ table provides height and layers in which the cast can play. The physicality the cast brings lifts the script up from its radio play heritage. It’s a wordy beast and the cast do a tremendous job of bringing farce to it, brightening what could be considered stodgy in places.

Bouquets to Sandra Alseban who is wonderful as Maxine, the focal point around which the rest of the cast buzz. She’s perfect as the drama teacher no one wanted to join them on the hike but whose journey as the unlikely hero makes sense of the whole piece.

Paula Wray and Kylie Vanston as Kath and Emily are a terrific double act as their dynamic gets more and more unhinged, thanks in part to a foil bladder of vodka and lime. For the second half, they really crank things up a notch. They bring the slapstick required to offset the moroseness of the other characters. There is even further they could push this, especially as Maxine heads off into soliloquy territory.

It is refreshing to see an all-female show, and there are certainly many gags that will be particularly familiar to women in the audience. The issue though is this piece is full of tropes rather than insights, and feeds the man-made myth that what women talk about when men aren’t around is men. Rather than bolstering the ambitions of women to be seen as more than just hot-flushers, door mats and nags, it fortifies the fallacies.

The pathos and depth often found in close readings of Hall’s plays is missing here. It feels almost as if he set out to prove something and in so doing simply reinforced the opposite – that a male writer can’t honestly and holistically write real women.

All that being said: women who’ve earned their opinions do get hot flushes, can’t drink like they used to, are left for younger women, do end up holding the baby, and at the end of the day will enjoy rounding up the troops and having a night out at the theatre together.

Social Climbers
12-28 March
Theatre Hawke’s Bay
Hastings