Victor Rodger and his mother Nora at the Arts Foundation Laureate Awards Photo: Jinki Cambronero
When asked by the Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi to describe the highlight of soon becoming a 2024 arts laureate, and winner of the Toi Kō Iriiri Queer Arts Award, playwright and producer Victor Rodger replied:
“It means that I get to stand in front of an audience and thank my mother for essentially being the main reason I get to stand there in the first place.”
Which is exactly what Rodger did, sharing the award at the Arts Foundation function late October with his “Mother Laureate”.
That was shortly before jetting off to Seoul in South Korea for the international premiere of Tusiata Avia’s acclaimed The Savage Coloniser Show, produced by Rodger.
Victor Rodger joined Culture 101 on his return.
The award also recognises a remarkable canon of ten plays for the stage, as well as Rodger’s work supporting Maōri and Pasifika writers for stage and screen.
Of Samoan and Scottish descent, he writes comedy. But it can be a dark comedy.
The sort of comedy where you laugh, and then have to stop to ask yourself why you’re laughing, and at whose expense.
Race, sexuality and identity have been at the heart of Rodger’s plays, confronting racism and homophobia with work that has a contemporary popular spunk born of a love of cinema. Rodger’s work meanwhile has also determinedly put Pacific characters at the fore.
Victor Rodger giving his acceptance speech at the 2024 Arts Foundation Laureate Awards Photo: Jinki Cambronero
These plays are bold, racy, hilarious and disturbing. In 2002’s Ranterstantrum (published last month by Playmarket) a gay actor is mistaken for a rapist in an urban Aotearoa take on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Black Faggot was a response to the 2004 Destiny Church ‘Enough is Enough’ March against the Civil Union Bill. In Club Paradiso from 2015, it’s a P-fuelled sadistic psychopath in a bar in Flatbush, Otara; a play a reviewer accurately noted as containing the most relentless graphic violence they’d ever seen in a theatre. A fact that didn’t stop the rave reviews.
Rodger won the Bruce Mason Playwriting Award way back in 2001, for his first play Sons.
In 2015 Rodger set up company FCC to produce work that gives Pacific practitioners the chance to be involved at all levels of production. That has included two works by his cousin Tusiata Avia, The Savage Coloniser Show and Wild Dogs Under My Skirt.
Victor Rodger was awarded an Order of New Zealand Merit for his work in 2021.
