Behind a side-door at Auckland’s Basement Theatre, 17 well-worn wooden steps mark an unassuming landmark in the city’s counterculture.
When you enter the carpark at the bottom of Grey’s Ave now, you’ll likely see a massive banner covering one side of a building. It advertises any given season of Basement Theatre’s work, showcasing a mixture of familiar and soon-to-be-familiar faces. More often than not, the roller door will be open. During the day, that open door welcomes in artists, whether they’re packing in shows or meeting with the venue about shows yet to come. At night, audiences spill out onto what is affectionately known as “the slab” – the block of concrete that loosely defines the theatre’s liquor licensing area, and with the aid of metal fences, corrals the venue’s community.
Just next to the roller door is a black door. On a busy night at Basement Theatre, you’ll find regulars sitting on little couch cushions in front of it, swapping gossip and sharing stories (this is affectionately called “the stoop” – everything has a nickname here, and most of them are affectionate). Through this door is a steep, imposing staircase. If you follow it up one flight, you’ll find yourself at the Basement Studio. Follow it up further and you’ll find yourself in the middle of Queen Street’s Classic comedy venue.
In a space that has undergone many shifts and changes in its century of life, the staircase is maybe the one thing that still exists as it always has – for better or worse.
Long before anybody trod the (concrete) boards at Basement Theatre, the area was a wetland. The Waihorotiu stream flowed from a spring where Karangahape Road is now, right down out to the Waitematā. In 1840, 3,000 acres of land that spans from the summit of Maungawhau to Judges Bay and Cox’s Bay was gifted by the chief of Ngāti Whatua, Apihai Te Kawau, to Governor Hobson. In return, Te Kawau and three other leaders received £50 and a quantity of blankets, clothing and goods.
For Basement Theatre’s executive director Cat Ruka, the building as it was built is a symbol of that early colonisation of Tāmaki Makarau. “It generated great wealth for an early European settler family,” she says. “It exists upon a stream and wetland that – despite being an incredibly important waterway for mana whenua – was covered over as part of the urbanisation of the area.”
That early settler was one George Sinclair, a seed merchant, whose legacy is still left on the building today – Silo Theatre is named after when the building was a grain silo, and the word “SILO” is emblazoned on the concrete floor as you step past the roller door.
Since then, the building has been a haberdashery, a dental supply store in the 50s and a gay nightclub called Backstage in the 70s. Understandably, the last of these is the most colourful. After being checked through a peephole, hundreds of men and women would dance behind locked doors in a venue with monochrome decor, wallpaper with silent movie stars and spotlit lighting.
Shane Bosher, who would later be the artistic director of Silo Theatre, tells a story that is a mixture of history “amplified by memory or nostalgia”, like many stories of queer venues during this time. “What I understood is that prior to law reform, there would be a night, once a month where illegal gay porn films – ‘loops’ as they were called then, would play at the Classic,” he says.
“Afterwards, the audience would come downstairs for a dance and then that space became Backstage.”
The club couldn’t get a licence, so it was run as a “member’s club”. Patrons would have a password to get drink tickets – essentially raffle tickets – that were exchanged for a wine or a beer, back in the days where the options were lager, draught, white wine or red wine. Fredrike Volt’s research from this year corroborates this, suggesting that raids on clubs and bars were not uncommon due to convoluted licensing laws. (Further anecdata suggests beers were left outside to dissuade cops from raiding the premises.) From there, the space became what it is now: a theatre.
First it was run as Auckland Youth Theatre by legend Jivan Mary Amoore QSM, then went through a few iterations under different leadership before, in 1997, it became the new space for Sharyn Duncan’s Basement Theatre, from which the venue gets its name. The Comedy Festival, then in its infancy, asked Duncan to manage the newly renovated theatre as a venue for stand-up routines, where it flourished until briefly closing in 1999, and reopening as Silo Theatre, due to a melange of investments from Creative New Zealand and various council entities.
After Silo Theatre moved into the space, if you went up the staircase, you were probably a member of the scant bar staff that worked there, and you’d find yourself navigating the bar stock – back then, Odyssey Wines and Stella Artois, no Pals or kombucha sorry – and a lot of rubbish bags.
In this era, what would become the Basement Studio was a hub of independent theatre company admin. Names like TheatreStampede (later Nightsong), Elephant Publicity and Massive Company took up residence there, as other companies rehearsed in the space above the main theatre.
Now, the staircase was mostly used when someone running The Classic needed to pop down and ask fairly basic admin questions. Even in fire drills, patrons downstairs would head into the carpark, and patrons all the way upstairs went out onto Queen Street rather than move down the staircase.
That doesn’t mean the staircase hasn’t been host to its own sort of drama, though.
Bosher recalls a moment back in 2004, when Silo Theatre’s runaway hit The Women, starring Mia Blake and Anna Hutchinson, was in season. It was a massively complex comedy, which required the eight actors involved to play over 60 characters with full costume changes. Because of that, the entire cast would usually sit around backstage in their underwear, putting faces on and curling their hair.
Upstairs, up that staircase, one of the office residents had ordered a number of fireworks from Wah-Lee’s, and they’d been sitting in the office for some time.
“The audience were coming into the space, the cast were on their 15-minute call, and this person let off a firework, for some unknown reason, in the stairwell,” Bosher recalls. “They got quite excited by it, so set off another one.”
“Of course, it set off all of the smoke alarms in the building.”
Three fire trucks were called. The patrons from the theatre evacuated out the roller door, and the patrons from the Classic presumably evacuated out onto Queen Street. However, the cast of The Women – in their robes, their half-painted faces, and their curlers – stood on a concrete pad outside neighbouring restaurant Tanuki’s Cave, hiding from their expectant audience.
The recent history of the venue is more familiar, easily at reach. After Silo Theatre moved out in 2008, having grown past what the theatre could provide it, a bunch of young actors, spearheaded by Charlie McDermott, Michelle Blundell and Morgana O’Reilly wanted to keep the space going as a theatre: a space where independent artists could make work without having to ask for permission.
After years of fundraising, advocacy and one-off gigs (few miss the death metal bands), in 2011 the Studio started to programme shows, and that’s when the staircase transitioned from being a space that was only seen by employees and artists into a space that saw audiences and community alike. Despite how steep it is (an accessibility issue that continues to plague, and be acknowledged by, the space), it was the obvious point of entry.
“It’s always been a cool space,” says Sam Snedden, the former general manager of Basement Theatre. “We realised if we cleaned it, and put in some lighting that doesn’t suck then it could actually be a cool transitional space.
“The major issue with it was that it was hideous.”
McDermott knew many graphic artists, who came in to work on the space. “We got in trouble when we repainted because obviously the whole of the Classic stunk of spray paint,” Snedden says, “which we of course did not anticipate or do anything about, because we’re idiots.”
Occasionally, artists would paint the top of the stairs with designs, or would otherwise decorate it to serve as a transitional space before going into a show. Access to The Classic was either explicitly or implicitly blocked off, though on a Big Wednesday you could hear whatever comic happened to be testing out their gear if you stood at the bottom of the staircase.
Since then, the staircase has been stagnant, but the people moving up and down it have been anything but. Basement Theatre has programmed hundreds of shows in the studio space, and those shows have involved thousands of artists, and been seen by tens of thousands of audience members. The wood of the staircase holds up strong (and even once, according to Snedden, held up as he and three others carried a grand piano up it).
However, it’s hard to walk up it and not think of all the people who have been prevented from seeing Basement Studio shows – some of the best and most memorable theatre in Auckland – because of it. “It would be nice to attach more fondness to it, to see it as an object of connection or even a talisman for us tenants,” says Ruka. “But the honest truth is that, for me, it’s a reminder of the work we need to do to enable access for more kinds of bodies here.”
In 2013, Auckland Theatre Company’s youth show, Like There’s No Tomorrow, a promenade show that took place around the entire venue, staged a meet-cute scene in the stairwell.
James Wenley’s review of that show opens thusly: “There’s a girl in the stairwell, quietly weeping, desperately trying not to be noticed … In her hands she tightly clutches a camera. She’s noticed by a Japanese exchange student, dressed as Godzilla, and his endearing shots at engagement cautiously tease out the reason for the girl’s distress.”
People clambered around, watching every little aspect, every awkward gesture and moment of this performance. Every other place of Basement Theatre has been performed in, likely more than once, but it remains one of the few moments where the staircase has been for performance, rather than transition. It is, undoubtedly, one of the most observed moments of history the staircase has had. Nobody comes to Basement Theatre for the stairs, after all.
For Bosher, that’s part of the appeal of that staircase, and every single step that makes it up. “Those stairs hold all these unknown histories of the people who have walked up them, walked down, had quiet conversations on them…”
“And swept them, because they hadn’t been in nine months.”
It was this year, during the floods, that the staircase’s use of a transitional space came up once again. Snedden was part of the crew shooting a movie at Basement Theatre, and Cyclone Gabrielle reared her head the night they happened to have the most extras on set: 50.
They were in the theatre when the cyclone hit, and because of the location of Basement Theatre – at the bottom of what was once a gorgeous waterway – they couldn’t get the extras out of the building. “It was literally hip-deep in the carpark,” Snedden recalls.
He had to call up to The Classic: “Open your door because I’m bringing through 50 people.” Even though they had a show on, there wasn’t any other way to get them out of the building.
In that moment, the staircase did what it was supposed to do; it carried people from one space to another. What makes the space notable, even beautiful, isn’t the architecture of these stairs; the unvarnished wooden steps, winding walls, comparatively recently installed handrails. It’s in the stories that have ascended and descended through nights and years and decades, and the histories sealed in ever-thickening layers of paint; entire communities and countless human connections enabled by one simple, unassuming, steadfast staircase.
