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Not the Happiest Place on Earth

REVIEW BY EWEN COLEMAN, THE DOMINION POST, 2 SEPTEMBER 2014

Having entertained and delighted millions of people of all ages for more than four decades with his films, Walt Disney’s private life was anything but the magic world of his movies.

While A Public Reading of An Unproduced Screenplay About The Death of Walt Disney is a fictionalised account of the man, and the screenplay that is at the heart of the play may never have been written, it nevertheless shows an interesting side of one of the greatest lights of entertainment.

On a simple but effectively designed set by Miranda Mansiadis resembling a cinema from a past era, Walt Disney (David McPhail) and his brother Roy (Nick Blake), his son-in-law Ron (Richard Falkner) and his Daughter (Jessica Robinson) sit at a large table and read through a screen play that Disney has written about his life.

Disney does most of the reading, including the directions of cut to and freeze frame, etc. Lucas Hnath’s writing is terse and sparse and not always easy to pick up on, and the style of presentation is somewhat unusual in that there is literally no movement, just the reading of the unproduced screenplay – yet it does work and does have a way of holding the audience’s attention.

This does make great demands on the actors, however, and it is to the credit of each that they create creditable and believable characters from the sparse dialogue.

Roy the brother was far more than just a sycophant to Disney’s whims and Blake portrays this well. The son-in-law marries into the dysfunctional family and has to work hard to gain a place in the Disney empire, and this is well shown by Falkner.

Robinson’s Daughter shows the pain of a daughter despising everything a man like Disney stood for, but loving him as a father.

And in the role of Disney himself, McPhail is outstanding. Apart from one brief moment, he spends the entire play seated at the table, yet he is never still, constantly talking either to the audience or to his family as he goes through the script, visualising and animating its many scenes with a grandeur that obviously made him the man he was.

That was until things didn’t quite go as per the script in the end when he finally succumbs to the lung cancer that killed him, bringing to an end an unusual yet intriguing play that is also entertaining.

Other reviews:

Charles Bisley, The Lumiere Reader, 6 September 2014

Thomas Phillips, Keeping Up with NZ, 10 September 2014