Chapter 13 - Why Kitchens Matter: Revisiting Renée’s Wednesday to Come

Summary

This essay is dedicated to Renée (1929–2023)

The year is 1934, during the Great Depression, which has plunged many families in Aotearoa/New Zealand into grinding poverty. In a rural, working-class kitchen, there is a palpable air of tension as a family goes about its routine tasks. Mary, a woman in her fifties, irons washing, while Granna, her mother, writes in her notebook and reminisces about the sea journey to Aotearoa when she was a young woman. Mary’s granddaughter Jeannie makes tea, while her grandson Cliff plays his mouth organ. Their mother, Iris, sits still at the table. She snaps at her children, and Mary attempts to calm her. When Iris’s brother-in-law Ted pulls up his van outside, they all freeze. Ted directs Mary and Cliff to carry in a homemade coffin, placing it on two chairs.

This excruciating drama of waiting is the opening scene of the play Wednesday to Come by New Zealand playwright and novelist Renée, first performed at Downstage Theatre, Wellington, in 1984. The coffin, which remains onstage until the end of the play, contains the body of Iris’s husband Ben, who has killed himself at one of the government relief camps set up during the Depression to provide work for unemployed men. During the course of the play, his family discovers that Ben became deeply depressed in his time at the camp. They find a harness among his meager belongings and learn that he was yoked to a plough along with a team of men because men were considered cheaper labor than horses. Although the play’s narrative is fictional, it is based on the real suffering of working-class families during the Depression, including the fact that in 1933 the government decreed that families of unemployed men were only entitled to welfare payments if their men went away to work in the rural relief camps. Historian Tony Simpson writes of the camps:

The conditions were primitive, almost barbaric in some instances […] It wasn’t much of a life, and the worst of it seemed to be that it had no end. A man on relief could only watch his wife and children starve. There was almost nowhere he could turn.