Auckland Theatre Company’s new play captures the essence of history and Helen Clark, but with more swears.

If you squinted a little, it was Helen Clark, and Helen Clark was saying, “I’ll show you backbone, motherfucker.” 

It was actually Lauren Gibson playing Helen Clark and she was glorious. In fact the whole 75 minutes of Auckland Theatre Company’s new production, Helen Clark in Six Outfits, about the life of the former prime minister, was glorious: the set, the script, the lighting and, most definitely, the legend of theatre, Jennifer Ward-Lealand. 

Ward-Lealand not only played an older version of Clark, but also, staggeringly – and brilliantly – played Clark’s dad, Clark’s mum, Jim Anderton, Brian Edwards, an image consultant and Judith Tizard. Her talent and skill is such that she moved flawlessly between the roles, giving each their own distinctive voice and stance, redrawing some of the country’s best-known political personalities afresh.

Her Tizard gave carbonated energy with a side of snide. At one point she slowly looked the young Clark up and down, taking in her dowdy outfit, before determining: “You look menopausal”. At another, she turned to the audience to regale them with a tale: “Nek minute…”

There was no way Tizard was saying “nek minute” in the era she was portraying. Just as there was no way Clark would have referred to Jim Anderton, in the late 80s, as “motherfucker”. Nor would she have recounted taking the Labour Party leadership from Mike Moore in 1993 like this: “I roll that sucker like a two-scoop ice cream.”

This artistic licence is the genius of the play. Pike River writer Fiona Samuels has sucked in decades of personal and political history and spat out sweary, comic entertainment for today that still pays homage to history. 

In the hands of director Sophie Roberts, the play blows through Clark’s role in the 81 Springbok tour protests, the anti-nukes era, Rogernomics, the invasion of Iraq, the foreshore and seabed debate and dozens of other fiery periods in our history.

But even the most extraordinary life can become boring or earnest in the wrong storyteller’s hands. This was a masterclass in pace, comic timing and wrangling time and truth. Samuels has thrown out linear storytelling and has the young and older Clark interact, Ward-Lealand’s Clark reaching back through time to offer Gibson’s Clark, in high school or at the beginning of her political career, advice and hints about the future. 

The set enables the interaction, with the elder Clark spending a good deal of time on a mountain rising from the stage and leaning over its side to offer wisdom and scroggin. 

While the mountain is a nod to Clark’s love of climbing, it really looms over the production as a visual representation of Clark’s decades-long uphill battle to be taken seriously in a sexist world. Accusations from the past – that she was a disgrace for wearing trousers to meet the queen, that she was a witch, a bitch, a nag – land in the present like grenades.  

The play closes out with Clark in her role at the UN. Ward-Lealand, having mastered Clark’s distinctive voice perfectly, reels off the world’s still appalling gender inequality statistics, and then thunders: “We can do driverless cars and AI, but we can’t do basic rights for half the planet.”