Travelling playwright journeys home

Press, 14 January 1987, Page 27

Travelling playwright journeys home

A New Zealand playwright, Craig Thaine, is back in the country after four and a half years in Italy, Egypt and . other parts of Europe. He has just returned with his latest play, “Ponte Vecchio,"’which is set in Italy just after the Second World War. It is Thaine’s first major fulllength play since he went overseas.

"When I left New Zealand four and a half years ago I felt a bit written out,” he said. “I made a conscious decision not to 'write — apart from keeping journals and writing a short play.”

The ideas for the play were in the back of his mind for about ’ three years but it took extensive background research before he wrote the first draft, in Cairo, at the beginning of last year. Then Thaine returned to Italy with a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council grant of $3OOO which he used for further research before he re-wrote the middle section of the play. Craig Thaine was born in Rangiora in 1958. He worked as a professional actor and production worker before he began writing in 1980.

He wrote for both stage and radio in New Zealand and was playwright-in-residence at the New Zealand Drama School, Wellington, in 1981 and 1982.

His years in Italy and Egypt were spent travelling and teaching English as a foreign language. Thaine says his initial idea, when he went overseas, was to live in a non-Anglo Saxon culture for some time.

He plans to return to Europe, probably to London, in another couple of months and to “push” his work there.