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Story: Plays and playwrights

Once on Chunuk Bair, 1982

<em>Once on Chunuk Bair</em>, 1982

This photograph from Maurice Shadbolt's play Once on Chunuk Bairshows its first production, at Auckland's Mercury Theatre in 1982. The action takes place between dawn and dusk on 8 August 1915, the day New Zealand soldiers took the hill of Chunuk Bair on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey during the First World War, suffering savage losses in the process. Shadbolt questions the wisdom of New Zealand participation in a remote European conflict, and undercuts the myth of the heroic Anzac soldier. A filmed version of the play appeared in 1991.

Using this item

Auckland Council Libraries − Tāmaki Pātaka Kōrero o Tāmaki Makaurau, Sir George Grey Special Collections

Reference: NZMS813(Chunuk Bair)

by Michael Tubberty

Permission of Auckland City Libraries Tāmaki Pātaka Kōrero must be obtained before any re-use of this image.

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How to cite this page

Murray Edmond, Plays and playwrights – Plays of the mid- and later 20th century, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/43948/once-on-chunuk-bair-1982 (accessed 4 June 2026).

Story by Murray Edmond, published 16 January 2014.

Comments

Ian Mune
15 August 2020
Jonathan Hardy was Director at the Mercury. We wanted some Kiwi plays. Maurice saw Moby Dick Rehearsed, was impressed. We went for a drink after the show and suggested he write a play. Yet another bar napkin contract, but within a year he came back with a script - Chunuk Bair. It seemed so full of verbiage to be unplayable, but as soon as the actors became involved it all changed. Thank God for actors.