Contextualising violence, word for word

The bell rang out across Central Hawke’s Bay College in Waipukurau, about an hour south of Napier, triggering a flurry of action as people streamed out of buildings, zig-zagging their way across the school grounds like armies of ants on a mission.

Some streams of students were bound for the drama room, perched like a fortress on the edge of the sports field, inside which the crew behind Verbatim were forming a stage out of black wooden boxes, and lining up chairs in front of it.

The drama room was typical of most, with a bench covered in papier maché masks at one end, a whiteboard plastered with names at the other, and a cheery colour scheme of purple and yellow. Actor Renee Lyons paced the length of it, readying herself for the performance ahead, in which she alone would play six characters.

Then, like the opening of a bull’s pen, a horde of Year 13 students came charging into take their seats. After a roll call loaded with the kind of back-sass that only a group of 17-year-olds could summon in response to their names being said aloud, it was time for the show to begin.

“I don’t know how you’re going to take what I tell you, but it’s me,” said Lyons as Aaron Sebastian Jonathan Daly, 22 years old and serving a life sentence for murder.

Verbatim is a play about violent crime in New Zealand, and its impact on everyone involved: the victims, their families, the offenders’ families and their wider communities.

It was devised by William Brandt and Miranda Harcourt in the early 1990s, through interviews with violent offenders in prisons, their families and that of the victim. Brandt then took the transcripts of the interviews and turned them – verbatim – into a 40-minute production that is both powerful and surreal.

“Getting hold of the scripts, we were struck by how relevant all of the words still were,” said Danielle Kelly, of youth justice organisation JustSpeak, which teamed up with the Auckland-based theatre company Last Tapes to take the play to schools, prisons and communities 20 years after it was first toured.

“Those voices haven’t necessarily become more visible over the last 20 years and that, I think, is a concern,” she said. “The problems [shown in the play] are still not being addressed.”

The class was silent, mesmerised as they watched Ms Lyons dart around the stage as Daly, a man eventually imprisoned after a life of crime that began at the age of four, when his older brothers would heave him through windows to help with their burglaries.

As he got older, his crimes escalated from petty theft, to drug offences, to burglaries and armed hold-ups in a hurricane of destruction, with the pieces left to others to pick up.

“Being the oldest in the family, I had to take all the responsibility,” said Daly’s older sister Danica (also portrayed by Ms Lyons), who spoke of the burden her younger brother was on her own life.

“In the end, I had to leave,” said the mother of his children, Cherie, who changed their last name from his.

“What have I done to keep having this pain all the time?” asked his mother. “They never had anything, no education – but they were loved. Six of them turned out fine, except for him.”

As the story progressed, what was to come was blaringly obvious; there was every clue. But just as obvious that somebody’s life was soon to end was the fact that none of these warning signs would be acted on.

In the end, Aaron violently killed a woman in a burglary gone wrong. He left her in a pool of her own blood on her living room floor to die, where she was later discovered by her husband Robert.

“The people that say time is a healer are crazy,” he said. “I don’t hate the fella; I just wonder what made him go that far. What does he feel? What made him tick?” She must have been so petrified.”

“Christ, he did some gruesome things,” said Danica.  “I go up to see him sometimes and I just think, ‘What the fuck am I doing here? Why do I bother anymore?’”

You usually see the 30-second news headline, but when you see it in this context it’s just completely different

Verbatim lays bare the tragic reality of a life of poverty, violence and drugs, without education and opportunity – all of which combined to spur a man down a spiral of violent crime, leaving a trail of devastation in his wake.

“It was definitely powerful,” said Tessa Hargreaves, 17, after the play. “It opened your eyes to what it’s really like. Like, you usually see the 30-second news headline, but when you see it in this context it’s just completely different.”

Another student Liv McCloskey agreed: “You’re usually shown the baddies, but this kind of opened it up to the families, the childhood, so you can kind of see how these things occur.”

“It kind of shows the reality of what happens,” said Jack Hitchens, 17, “like, with the media and stuff, it often hides a lot of the issues, like poverty and violence.”

While Elise Barkle, 18, agreed with her classmates, she thought the play was “controversial”. “You do see the criminal’s family side of things and how they grew up and everything, but then you’ve got someone on the other side of it saying, ‘Well they didn’t have to go down that path; there are opportunities for someone to get an education.’ It’s controversial and it can spark a very big debate.”

That was exactly what JustSpeak’s Danielle Kelly wanted the tour to do. “One of the purposes was to stimulate discussion about criminal justice, criminal offending, what it means and how can we address it, and to stimulate it in an unintimidating way where anyone can participate in the discussion,” she said. “They’re not easy conversations to have, there are no easy answers and they’re hard things to address.”

That evening, it was time to take Verbatim to the affluent, leafy town of Havelock North – a maze of suburban streets where the houses had wrought iron gates, picket fences, trimmed hedges and well-kept gardens. A diverse crowd of lawyers, community workers, victim support staff, teens, parents and gang members streamed into the cosy Keirunga Homestead Theatre, nestled in a garden on a hill at the edge of town. Organisers had to find more seats so that everyone was able to see the powerful story play out on stage.

Afterwards, everyone hung around to discuss the play and the issues it raised over free cake. A patched Mongrel Mob member told the crowwd that it was “eye-opening”: “You never get to see the victim’s side, so thanks for that.”

“How can we white, middle-class people help?” asked one audience member, to passionate nods of agreement. Some audience members were still wiping their eyes, a good 15 minutes after the play had ended.

LISTEN to Di White of JustSpeak talk to Megan Whelan about last year’s collaboration with Last Tapes Theatre Company:

The discussion was frank, raw, and moving, and represented the merging of two communities to address a problem that they’d come to see as belonging to both of them.

“If there’s violence, like there has been in my home, we have to have the courage to change. If we don’t, then we get the same old deal,” said Zack Makaore, the general manager of the Hastings-based Te Taitimu Trust, a youth organisation that deals with families in similar situations to the Daly’s. “So if we’re to take what was portrayed tonight, courage is a big thing for a lot of people.

“Some of us go and lock our doors and say, ‘Oh well, that’s not our problem, that’s the police’s problem’, but if we’re to have a better community, these sorts of things [need to] influence our way of thinking.”

One of the rangatahi Mr Makaore brought with him was Mariah Richmond, 16, a student at Napier’s Tamatea High School and the eldest of seven children from a Black Power family. Her father was imprisoned when she was six years old. She related to the issues raised in the play, and the character of Daly’s sister Danica, and said the community response was “inspiring”.

“It took me right in there – like, I felt like I was actually there and the different times gave me the real emotions,” she said. “It was very powerful. I tried not to cry. Some parts of the stories I related to myself just because I’ve witnessed it before.

“Tonight’s acts were a lot more intense than why my dad was in there but yeah, it was definitely powerful, and there’s a lot of that stuff going on out there,” she said. “And I actually don’t think the community is aware of what’s going on. I think it’s really hidden because we only know about it when we get to see it on TV. I think our communities are very…they’re not very together, like, not much voice is heard.”

Mr Makaore said the evening was an “illustration of how powerful the arts can be” in bridging two communities described by many present as “siloed”. “If we can see how violence is portrayed on the stage, we can see the other side too, on how we can fix it and find solutions in the community,” he said.

After he spoke he was swamped by members of the community, many of whom he had never met before, who wanted to exchange details and offer support to the people and families his trust dealt with. “There are people here tonight that wanted to volunteer their time – lawyers, accountants and such,” he said. “I’m not asking them for their money, I’m asking them for their help. They got the picture, they got it!”

Later that night, in the empty theatre, Danielle Kelly sat taping up chords and packing up lights with an grin on her face.

“One of the most rewarding parts of it, for me, is the connections that people make between each other – the audience members, the speakers and people offering to volunteer and all these other things, it’s just such a rewarding part of these sorts of things where we can get the communities together,” she said.

“My hope is that people come away from these shows and continue to think about these issues and –whether it’s conscious or not – it can subtly shift the way they think about it or the depth of their understanding. So, that in future, there’s some awareness there of Danica’s voice, or Robert’s voice.”

Tickets are still available for Verbatim in Invercargill tonight and tomorrow. The tour has been made possible courtesy of the support of CreativeNZ, Q Theatre, iTicket, the Robson Hanan Trust, and The Tindall Foundation.

This content is brought to you with funding assistance from New Zealand On Air.