New Zealand Writers
SINCLAIR, Stephen
His plays are often concerned with the tensions of race and culture.
Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998). About the Companion entries View list of Companion contributors
SINCLAIR, Stephen (1956– ), is a popularly successful playwright, and a screenwriter and poet. He was born in Auckland and educated at Westlake BHS and Auckland and Victoria universities (BA in Maori studies 1979).
He worked as a researcher for the Maori studies department for two years, and subsequently as a translator of Maori manuscripts for National Archives. His plays are often concerned with the tensions of race and culture, as in Le Matou (‘The Fishhook’; jointly written with Samson Samasoni, first performed 1984), the first play to dramatise the experience of Samoan immigrants to New Zealand. Sinclair was also active in the establishment of Tao Tahi, the first *Pacific/*Maori theatre company, which performed Le Matou and other plays about Polynesian concerns. In Caramel Cream (first performed in 1991) he explores the tensions between Maori and Pakeha racism and sexism, especially for the ‘caramel cream’ who is ‘brown on the outside, white in the middle’. Other plays, such as The Houzie Show, a community-based political show written with Simon Wilson (first performed 1981), and the musical Big Bickies (first performed 1988), are satirical attacks on aggressive capitalism.
Many of his plays have been written in collaboration, most notably the huge box office success Ladies’ Night and its sequel Ladies’ Night 2: Raging On, both written with Anthony *McCarten. Although Ladies’ Night starts with the gritty realism of unemployment for a group of hopeless young men, its enormous popularity (which led to several national tours after its first performance in 1987) was largely due to the inspired showmanship of the male strip show which the young men develop, and which constitutes a big production extravaganza for most of the second half of the play. A similar determination to flout political correctness lay behind The Sex Fiend (written with Danny Mulheron, first performed 1989), and the violently bad taste comedy splatter movies ‘Meet the Feebles’ (1990) and ‘Braindead’ (1992), both co-written with Fran Walsh and director Peter Jackson. In addition to other plays and film work, Sinclair has published Twenty Poems (Cabbage Press, Auckland, 1976), and his poetry has also appeared in *Landfall, *Climate and Zero [US], and in the Cabbage Press Anthology (1978). This also includes poems by his father, Keith *Sinclair. He has written two books for children, Thief of Colours (1995) and Dread (forthcoming 1998). He lives in Auckland.
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Updated Information
The Dwarf and the Stripper is a book of poems published in 2003.
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