An interview with NZ Post Mansfield Prize winner and writer of Horseplay, Ken Duncum
30 April 2010
Straight from the Horse’s Mouth... ATC Literary Manager Philippa Campbell talks to Ken Duncum
It’s rather exotic to be interviewing a New Zealand playwright resident in the South of France. Congratulations on being the 2010 winner of the New Zealand Post Mansfield Prize. How is Menton treating you?
Very well – Menton has orange trees in the streets, and underneath them roam the ghosts of many a writer and artist. And there are echoes and shadows of forty previous Katherine Mansfield Fellows (I’m the 41st). It’s strange because this little part of the world has been so comprehensively written about by New Zealanders that there’s hardly a place you can visit or a vista you can look at that hasn’t turned up in a NZ poem or novel. We’ve colonised it!
Where did the idea for HORSEPLAY come from? Were you a fan of Morrieson and Baxter before you began writing the play?
A bit of a fan of both – but I had to learn more about each of them to be able to write the play. That was fun – both Ron and Jim are good company.
Creating stories around writers and their work is generally considered to be fraught with dangers. You face this head on in HORSEPLAY. Was the risk of putting two great writers together part of the attraction?
I did want to write something with characters who could really use language, who weren’t stuck in ‘ordinary speak’ – and who showed what a New Zealand version of Shakespearian language could be like, both in its poetry and its slang. It was a bit scary when I realized that my writing in the play would have to blend seamlessly with that of two of our greatest writers – no pressure – but I was having fun by then and forged on regardless. The major reason writing about writers can be tricky is that they often don’t do a lot – just kind of sit around and scribble or angst about writer’s block - but Morrieson’s own characters are always carried along in a whirlwind of macabre and bizarre plot and event, so I figured a story with him in it should do the same thing.
The play is the story of an imagined meeting between the two men. Could you tell us a little about the processes you went through fictionalising your protagonists?
I read as much as I could about both – and I read their work also. I remember going to the National Library to watch some video of Baxter reading THE BALLAD OF FIRETRAP CASTLE, trying to fix his voice in my mind. But after that, when I started to write, I tried to extrapolate from what I knew. Having got an idea of them (and knowing it was only an idea) I threw them together round a dead horse and figured out step by step how I thought they’d react, how they’d bring themselves and their preoccupations into the situation.
Read the full blog entry here
