Jan Bolwell's @Bill Massey's Tourist's' Tonight, 7.30pm Old Lodge Theatre

Vaughan Bradley from Hokitika Regent Theatre

A granddaughter tells her grandfather’s story

Consummate performer Jan Bolwell plays her adolescent self, encouraging her grandfather Arthur to talk about the First World War. What follows is a gripping, painful and sometimes hilarious tale of a young Kiwi soldier from the Otago Mounted Rifles (one of Bill Massey’s tourists) and his survival from the tragedy of Passchendaele. It is a story that also features song and dance.

“This exceptional performer, Jan Bolwell, is blessed with an irrepressible joie-de-vivre that communicates itself instantly to the audience, so that her grandfather’s story is illuminating and memorable, but also surprisingly enjoyable.” -Terry McTavish

“A terrific script. A great performance. A tale well told. Knocked me for six.”- Raymond Hawthorne

Biography
Jan Bolwell is a playwright, performer, choreographer and director of Wellington’s Crows Feet Dance Collective. In 2014/15 the Collective presented The Armed Man, a full-length dance work about WW1.

‘Bill Massey’s Tourists’ is Jan’s fifth play and the third in a trilogy of solo plays. Standing on my Hands told the story of her father’s WW2 experiences and Here’s Hilda! was the dramatisation of her grandmother’s life. In 2013, together with Sacha Copland and John Smythe, to much acclaim, she toured her play Dancing in the Wake with AOTNZ. Double Portrait, her play about Frances Hodgkins, also toured extensively throughout New Zealand.

In late 2015 Jan was awarded a writer's residency at the Robert Lord Writer's Cottage in Dunedin. She is currently writing a play about Freda du Faur, the first woman to climb Aoraki/ Mount Cook in 1910, and Lydia Bradey the first woman to climb Mount Everest solo without oxygen. The play Taking the High Ground opens at Bats Theatre in Wellington this December. A the moment Jan is directing and choreographing the political satire Destination Beehive 2017 opening next month at Circa Theatre, Wellington.

…conveys with a compelling simplicity what it was like for a 20 year-old New Zealander to be thrown into the maelstrom of bloody war.
Laurie Atkinson