Prisoners of Mother England
by Roger Hall
4 Dec 2003 – 13 Dec 2003
Prisoners of Mother England was one of Hall�s early plays, written in the late 1970s while he was employed at the University of Otago. Like many of his plays, this is a comedy with sharp undertones. The predictable one-liners are there, along with the humour that appears superficial but which masks deeper feelings of confusion and pain.
Life is not easy for these new arrivals; they had hoped for a better life but had not realised how much they had been shaped by what they had left behind. Some managed to make the transition easily, some with difficulty, a few not at all. They lived through a time of political turbulence, when everything that had at first seemed so easy became more difficult. The good life of the late 50s and early 60s when butter was �ninepence a pound, cigarettes two shillings for twenty, �petrol three bob a gallon� moved gradually into troops being sent into Vietnam, the introduction of decimal currency and the Wahine disaster.