Sydney Bridge Upside Down (play)

Sydney Bridge Upside Down, by David Ballantyne, is the book my NZ Lit lecturer would constantly enthuse about as the great lost NZ novel. Despite this, he hadn't actually put it on the curriculum (I am trying to remember what novels we had, actually - Owls Do Cry (Janet Frame) and Man Alone (John Mulgan) in first year, both of which I hated for different reasons, but maybe second year was Patricia Grace's Cousins and Albert Wendt's Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree? I am unsure. I also have a highly ambivalent relationship with pretty much all NZ literary novels except the bone people, and pretty much just wallowed in poetry and plays), and although I remember tracking Sydney Bridge down in the university library and reading the blurb, I never read it. Still. The memory of not reading it stuck with me, and when I saw Taki Rua was doing the play, I wanted to go.

The only performance I could get to was over two hours on Sunday night two days after getting back from an international trip, with work on Monday, and I pretty much showed up telling my fellow theatre goer that I totally reserved the right to leave at intermission. Fortunately, the play totally grabbed me, and I had absolutely no problem staying for the whole thing - it was vivid, strange, not entirely successful and completely compelling by turns, understated and over the top. I am still not sure what happened, in many respects, and now I really want to read the book.

( Sydney Bridge Upside Down. )