Door-to-door showman
by Prue Dashfield
(NZ House and Garden Oct 2001)

Prue Dashfield is on the trail of the flamboyant Warwick Broadhead

As an itinerant showman, Warwick Broadhead is away from home for months at a time and nobody has proved that absence makes the heart grow fonder more conclusively than he.

Crossing his threshold after an eight-year absence he was filled with such a profound sense of relief and warmth and homecoming that Warwick Broadhead was moved to marry his house.

About sixty friends attended the Auckland wedding. Warwick was both bride and groom - a gride seems an appropriately Lewis Carroll word for a man who has taken The Hunting of the Snark, An Agony in Eight Fits into more than 350 homes in New Zealand, England and the United States.

Radiant in cloak and a headdress of inflated plastic bags he strolled along the mantelpiece, plunged into the arms of guests and was carried across the room to his sister, who gave the bride away to his bungalow in Grey Lynn. Once he was hitched, the party ate meringues and chocolate sauce off Warwick's bare tummy.

Quirky, you think? It's a shame Lewis Carroll wasn't around. He would have made the perfect bridesmaid.

Guests were asked to bring lengths of earth-toned fabric to braid during the ceremony. Later Warwick sewed the plaits into a runner with shoelaces - flooring on a shoestring.

Those who forgot to bring their fabric improvised with whatever came to hand, leg, even breast. "Look at that grass," Warwick points at a clump of dehydrated blades protruding from the rug, "someone stopped by the roadside and picked it! Someone else took off their jeans and they got woven in. Someone's bra is in it!"

The runner's attractively bowed shape was a bit of serendipity, the result of inconsistent tension in its constituent strands.

Warwick has lived with the bungalow for twenty-one years but didn't make an honest house of it till 1999 when "I walked in after eight years away and was flooded with this warm feeling of coming home. It was sort of a love feeling".

A friend said, "Warwick, if you feel this way about the house, you should marry it" and even though the rapture of reunion was only an hour or two old before he was reminded of his beloved's flaws - cracked plaster, stiff windows - that fateful suffusion of emotion still catches him unawares.

Although it is half of what is possibly one of the great romances of our time, the house must be concerned that Warwick is exposed to so many potential rivals for his affections by the nature of his work.

He is one of this country's few - if not its only - performers of adult theatre in the home. He enables us to have a night out, in. And next month he embarks on a sixteen-month national tour of a new show, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's tear-making fairy tale The Selfish Giant. Of course, there is no question of the house accompanying him. Not in the Mitsubishi.

The hunt for the absurd Snark isn't over - the Bellman, Beaver, Butcher Baker et al who sought it with thimbles and "sought it with care, pursued it with not its only forks and hope" will continue to do - for as long as Warwick is around.

But The Selfish Giant, with Warwick in the title role and the children and villagers on a video shot in his garden is the next act for the thousands of New Zealanders who have already been well and truly Snarked.

He read Carroll's poem in 1985 after his spiritual teacher recommended it but he couldn't see how he could make such a wordy, Victorian piece work as drama. He tried it as community theatre and it flopped. But years later in Rajasthan he saw tiny paintings done with a single camel hair and he thought, "That's it. I'm going to do The Hunting of the Snark in miniature".

And in Varanasi at the time of the snake festival, he looked through open doorways at families gathered round the snake charmers' baskets and he thought again, "That's it. I'm going to do it in people's homes".

Everything he needs for the Snark - the crew of little characters made from Fimo, their costumes, his own, are contained in an old leather suitcase.

The stage is a collapsible wooden card table.

Warwick brings his own lights and for his $400 (audience limit, twenty) asks only for a room to prepare in, a light meal an hour before the performance and payment on arrival "to set the performer's mind at rest".

He suggests the hosts serve guests the "Snarkfood" mentioned in the poem - bride cake, muffins, jam, mustard and cress.

And although his costume is representative of the hopeless ship's captain, in person Warwick's energy and facility with the sewing machine bring to mind the "Beaver that paced on the deck, Or would sit making lace in the bow ..."

For The Selfish Giant (development funded by Creative NZ and the Screen Innovation Production Fund) he brings television video, lights and music by Don McGlashan and Jonathan Besser to an audience of up to forty chez vous - naturally he'll need a power point.

Warwick's performance career began in Sydney and continued with San Francisco's flamboyant Angels of Light Theatre Troupe till an expired visa returned him home to Auckland. To his parents, Warwick's artistic ambitions had suggested a rather alarming sexual ambiguity and he'd left the country to pursue them. At sixteen he'd announced that he wanted to be a ballet dancer. "People will talk behind your back." they said.

"Now I've got a whole career where I try to get people to talk behind my back."