David Lawrence
“The worst thing in my life was also responsible for some of the best things in my life.”
David Lawrence found so much comfort in Shakespeare’s Hamlet after his father died when he was fifteen that he made theatre his life, creating a connection to his theatre-loving dad.
David Lawrence’s Auckland living room is surely the encapsulation of this man. Every stringed instrument imaginable is propped against one wall, while against the others, books – fiction and non – are shelved high.
Plays and theatre books proliferate, and most are well-thumbed. There’s Shakespeare, a lot of Shakespeare, including several versions of the play Hamlet, all with loads of notes pencilled in the margins. Not that David needs the text these days, really, as he knows every word, every stage direction, every double meaning.
“I remember where I was when I finished memorising the play. I was doing a show in Melbourne in 1997, and I was walking across the bridge over the Yarra River when I realised I knew it all. I’ve read it scores of times – scores – starting from when I was fifteen.”
That’s when David – then living in Wellington – was at a “semi-party” at a friend’s house in July 1991. Not in a party mood, he took himself upstairs to his friend’s room to be alone.
“Everybody was having a great time, and I did not want to be a part of it for reasons I couldn’t articulate. Whether that was emotion about Dad, and whether that was influenced by the wine and cider we’d been drinking in the park as well? Anyway, everyone’s coats and bags had been put in my friend’s room, and on the top of one bag was a copy of Hamlet, which someone had been assigned for a class. I picked it up and started reading. I read the play that night, probably understanding only a third of it at best. I kept that copy with me for the weekend, and kept reading and memorising the passages that spoke to me.
“What unlocked Shakespeare for me was that I realised somebody living 400 years ago could articulate the experience I was having on a level nobody else in my life seemed capable of.”
Thirty-five or so years later, aged forty-seven when we talk in his living room, surrounded by his instruments and books, David now has three productions directing Hamlet under his belt. He’s staged many other Shakespeare productions as he’s a Shakespeare specialist, the artistic director of New Zealand’s Pop-up Globe, and has even written an enormously detailed Shakespeare book. However, as an actor he’s never played Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, aside from a one-off performance of Act II for a university class. Too close to the bone, maybe? A bit too much like art imitating life, or perhaps life imitating art?
Maybe.
As the reason David was up in that bedroom, away from his carefree peers, and why Hamlet spoke so clearly from the pages, was that his own dad had not long died. And David’s family life was complicated.
David with his father in 1976.
“My father died of a sudden heart attack on November the 5th 1990. He was a month off his fifty-ninth birthday. He died two weeks after my fifteenth birthday, ten days after my youngest sister’s twelfth birthday, and ten weeks after my other sister’s thirteenth birthday.” David is very precise about his recollections. It’s clear all those feelings are deeply ingrained. Decades have passed, sure, but it’s like David has internalised it. It’s in his body’s memory. And if there are any uncertainties, he consults his diaries from the time and confirms or corrects later.
“There were sixteen years between my parents, and they got married and were having children at the same time as my father’s adult children from his first marriage were getting married and having children. So, at the time my father died, there was an ex-wife and three adult children, a legal wife and three young children – us – and a young girlfriend in the mix. And, as my mother saw it, she was still married to Dad.”
David’s dad, John, was, David says, “serially unfaithful”. In his first marriage he’d had three children, but left that wife to marry David’s mother and had three more children. Then he’d left David’s mother and was living with another woman who was twenty-six years old. There had been other women in between, throughout both marriages, and David was twelve when his mother discovered this latest affair. David says his mother told him to get counselling for his repeated unfaithfulness or move out. David’s father opted against the counselling.
While his younger sisters were happy to go and stay with their father on weekends, David was not. “I was very, very angry with him for leaving, and in the two and a half years leading up to his death, I had not been speaking to him for two of those years,” he says.
David and his father on David’s second birthday in 1977.
David’s father had been a “lifelong public servant”, but with the government’s dismantling of the public service in the late 1980s, he’d been made redundant. At the time of the affair that ended his marriage to David’s mother, he was the stay-at-home parent while David’s mother had gone to work full time.
David says, even after he moved out, his father was still very much part of the family, even with its changed dynamic. He came over each morning and got them off to school, did the shopping and housework, took the kids to their sports games and music lessons, and made the dinner, which they ate as a family.
“Then, instead of falling asleep with the newspaper in front of the late news, Dad would make the eight o’clock cup of tea and biscuits, say ‘I’ll see you all tomorrow’, and drive off to his new house. Mum thought the arrangement was preserving some sense of normalcy, especially for my sisters, and I guess it was, sort of. But it exacerbated my anger. It was like we were pretending to be a normal functioning family. And, I think, for Mum it enabled her to maintain an illusion that she was still properly married – one of her great embarrassments the week Dad died was the funeral notice in which his young girlfriend acknowledged herself as his partner.”
The day John died, David was at school. It was Monday, second period, and he was in science class. “The head guidance counsellor came in and said something to the science teacher. The teacher went white and looked at me, and the guidance counsellor said, ‘We need you to come with us’. I was, like, ‘Oh, is this temporary?’ and they said, ‘No, no, bring your stuff with you’.”
As they walked upstairs to the school car park, the guidance counsellor told David his mother was waiting for him, that there was “some sad news”. “I had been thinking we were going to have another argument about what subjects I was to take the following year, but if that was the case, why had my teacher’s face looked like that? And why does the counsellor sound so pitying?”
Then David met up with his mother. “My mum hugged me and said, ‘Dad has died’. I could see my great-aunt, my maternal grandmother’s sister, in the car crying. I knew my great-aunt was furious with Dad, so why would she be so upset about Dad dying? I thought I must have misheard Mum, that it was my grandmother who was dead, especially as she wasn’t at the school with Mum.
“Even though my mother had told me my father had died, with the shock and everything that was going on, that just didn’t add up. In all the confusion, it honestly took at least ten minutes for me to work out, that, actually, yes, it was Dad who was dead. That he’d had a massive heart attack that morning and had died instantly, just as he and his girlfriend were leaving to go on holiday.”
They then drove to pick up David’s sisters from school and went back home. David’s mother got busy with the practical aspects of telling everyone and starting to organise his funeral – her role as his wife, as she saw it, David says. “She was organising all these disparate elements, not realising that, actually, our family was one of those disparate elements as far as our father’s adult children were concerned.”
David’s recollection of that day is of the funeral director coming to the house to make funeral plans along with David’s half-brother and his father’s girlfriend. David sat with them in the living room “feeling cold and numb”. It was strange enough to have his half-brother in the house, as he’d “never set foot” in there before because, David explains, his brother had gone through exactly the same tensions with their father when he left his own mother for David’s mother. Then David went to his room and sat typing on his “old, clunky” Imperial typewriter. “I was always writing novels and stories and things, and I thought I might as well keep writing.”
And David’s sisters? They went back to school that afternoon.
“I think my sisters wanted to go back to school. I have my mother’s journals, and she wrote that the house must have been really bleak and dreary. I think they went back to school in the afternoon after the funeral as well. I feel like my sisters had strong support at school, that their classes embraced them, made them sympathy cards, that they were acknowledged and looked after.
“For me the day after he died, I thought, ‘What am I going to do today? I might as well just go to school’. I don’t know if I went to school thinking I’d be looked after and supported, but I found I had to tell people my father had died, as people kept saying, ‘Oh, where were you yesterday?’ Even one of my best friends – now the only friend I still have who knew my dad – had to ask me two days later if my father had died that week, because his mother had seen the death notice in the newspaper. I didn’t talk to friends about it unless it came up. Another friend passed me a note during English asking if what she’d overheard me tell others was true.”
Not only did David’s classmates not know about his father, his teachers didn’t seem to know either. David’s now been a teacher himself, and a university lecturer, and has received many messages about young people in his classes dealing with issues teachers should be aware of, might make accommodations for.
“Like, ‘here are things to bear in mind’, that this student might be volatile or delicate, or might not turn up or might not hand their assignment in. But it seemed that my science teacher, who knew Dad had died before I did and who was also my homeroom teacher, along with the guidance counsellor who came to get me, did not circulate the news so teachers knew to be sensitive or careful around me. Nobody seems to have thought to share the news.
“I feel like I’ve blocked many events out, but I do remember a couple of instances of answering teachers who said something like, ‘Where’s your assignment from Monday?’ by going, ‘My father died, I had more important things to be thinking about’. Or they said, ‘Why weren’t you in third period yesterday?’ ‘Well, because I was carrying my father’s coffin into a hearse’.”
David returned to school the day after his father’s funeral. He remembers feeling highly stressed and alienated, especially as the funeral held for his father was not the funeral David had had some part in planning. The details his mother and half-brother had nailed down, David says, were upended the next day when his half-brother changed everything. Any contribution David might have made to honour his father was gone.
“It ended up being a bizarre funeral in that it was held at a church my father had never set foot in, and conducted by an Anglican minister who’d never met my father and yet gave a eulogy about him. It was a funeral where on one side of the front row was my mother, my sisters and me, my maternal grandmother and other members of our extended family, while on the other was my confused paternal grandmother, my father’s current partner, her mother, my father’s ex-wife, my father’s adult children and other various strands.”
David did have a close friend sitting beside him, and while adult David believes that was good, young David had mixed feelings. “My friend Jacob had turned up about five minutes before we were to leave for the funeral and said, ‘This isn’t up for discussion – I’m coming with you’. Having Jacob at the funeral was great when I look back on it, but at the time it made me further shut down, thinking, ‘I can’t let him see me show emotion’, both because I didn’t want to be vulnerable but also I didn’t want to upset him.
“I feel like I stared at my knees or the floor for most of the funeral, really. Until I was lifting Dad’s coffin into the car, and couldn’t hold it together, I didn’t cry. But at the same time I was thinking, ‘Fucking hell, you’re a fifteen-year-old whose dad has just died – you’re allowed to cry!’ I realised many funerals later how much that day messed me up for dealing with funerals. I’ll do anything to avoid going to a funeral.”
David, like so many other boys around the death of their fathers heard words along the lines of: “Remember, you’re the man of the family now. You can’t let your emotion show, you’ve got to be strong for your mother and your sisters”.
“I think that absolutely contributed to my shutdown during the funeral,” David says. “I shut down so much I couldn’t remember who said that, or even if I’d imagined it. But years later I spoke to my godmother who remembered that being said, and said she thought then it was awful. ‘That was a terrible responsibility to put on to you’, she told me.”
The complications of the various family politics added to David’s sense of stress and alienation. David says his mother, as his father’s legal wife, ended up paying for the funeral and “being stuck with his bills”. The finances were complicated further as it became clear his father had used the portion of his redundancy earmarked for David and his sisters’ university education to buy a house for his girlfriend.
“I think he did that in the expectation that by the time we needed it, he’d have topped it back up from future earnings. So, another fallout from Dad’s death was that my mother spent the next five years in court trying to get back what she considered legally ours. I was in the middle of my second year of university by the time we got the money.”
David feels like his three half-siblings consolidated around their father’s girlfriend, supporting her rather than his mother, and certainly not supporting David and his sisters. He says even the young relations on his father’s side, who they had previously spent heaps of time with, had been told not to talk to them.
“Yet another of the many fallouts from Dad dying was that his mother, my grandmother, went into a fugue state. Dad had been paying for Nana to stay in a nice rest home, but without him she had to move into what was essentially state care. Every Saturday Mum and I would visit, and it was just awful because every weekend she would say, ‘Where’s John? Is he at rehearsal?’ because my father spent his social life in musical theatre and light opera. My mother, being incapable of lying, would say, ‘No, John died’. Every Saturday I watched Nana receive and process that news for the first time. I shut down when we went to visit her, then just stopped going.”
David’s mother died in 2020 and he inherited her diaries. He didn’t feel “compelled” to read them, but found a passage where she detailed that period, explicitly so her children would have a record.
“I felt less icky about going into her diary because it was clear she’d written them for us. I’d thought Mum just carried on as though life was normal, showing us we should put it behind us as though it didn’t happen. But in her diary Mum says, ‘Nobody gave us support, and so I went on autopilot trying to keep the family running and ensuring that everybody ate and did their homework and had clean clothes and some semblance of a life’.”
Life was far from normal for David, though. It had all changed. And so had David.
“I went from being an effortlessly high achiever to failing half of my school subjects. I didn’t care anymore – especially about maths and science. There was some antisocial behaviour that could be seen as being a rebellious teenager, but I know it was uncharacteristic behaviour unconsciously linked to my dad.”
Despite the plunge in academic performance, David says no teacher or dean ever questioned him about it.
“I was talking to my oldest school friend recently, and he said he had noticed how my marks plummeted, as did my attitude. We were in a band together and I remember a point where he was, like, ‘Dude, your mood – it makes band practices really hard when you’re this negative’, but neither of us had the emotional articulation to go, ‘I wonder if this is about Dad dying?’
David and his father at a Trade Fair in May 1984.
“My exam results the year after my father died were terrible – apart from English and Art, which for me required no effort – and my mother was very upset. The deputy principal called me in for a meeting the week before the following school year started, where he greeted me by saying, ‘Ah, David Lawrence, the failure…’ and proceeded to tell me he didn’t see why I should be allowed into Journalism or Classical Studies, even though I’d met all the prerequisites. I felt humiliated and embarrassed, which I think was his intended effect.
“I walked out of that meeting thinking, ‘In what world would you look at the marks of a kid whose father had recently died and decide, “Oh, he’s just lazy”, rather than, “Maybe there’s something going on that explains the sudden downturn?”’ It was absolutely terrible.”
A few years later David found out his mother had asked the deputy principal to do this – like an intervention, sort of... “Which made a bit more sense, but it seemed incredible that my mother – grieving herself and struggling to hold it together – that even her response was to decide, ‘Oh, he’s just not working hard enough’, rather than, ‘Oh, maybe he’s been majorly affected by the death of his father’. Nobody talked to me about it. Nobody really acknowledged it.”
Over the summer between the year of his dad dying and the following school year, David did have conversations with friends about his father’s death. Some were helpful, acknowledging what he was going through, while others were not. One friend even declared him uncaring because he went straight back to school after his father died.
“But when it was acknowledged it helped me see the part my father’s death was playing in my head, and that I’m feeling like this not because I’m crazy, but because I’ve lost a parent. I remember starting my second last year of school and suddenly feeling, ‘Ah, that funk has evaporated and everything’s great’. I went into that year being happy and personable and sociable again, instead of lashing out at people in my grief.”
Part of David’s grief was that he and his father had just started rebuilding the relationship shattered by his father’s infidelity. “I had been so angry at him. It was only in the six months before he died that I would willingly stay at his place and do things with him.”
David is a “lifelong Doctor Who fan” and he and his dad would watch bootlegged VHS copies of old 1960s episodes of that and other science fiction shows. “I’d forgotten, but through my childhood Dad used to use me as an excuse to go and see the latest Star Wars film, or to watch things with monsters and spaceships, and we’d go to plays together. In thinking about this, I’ve realised he imprinted a lot of his interests on me.
“I think, as angry as he would have been that I failed maths, that I didn’t go to law school or medical school, I can imagine passing on hardcore academic Beatles podcasts to him, saying, ‘Dad, listen to this insane three-hour podcast about Ringo Starr’s drum patterns’, or, ‘Here’s the latest episode of this new live-action Star Wars TV show we should watch together’. We had a lot of shared interests, so my relationship with him in the few months before he died was much better than it had been. And then it was lost.”
What David was finding, however, was a future in music. He started playing in a band with professional musicians and was roped in, last minute, to play in a musical.
“The other guitarist, who was aged somewhere between thirty-five and fifty – who knows, I was young – would give me a lift home each night after the show, and we’d sit in his car and talk about our musical interests. One night he said, ‘So, your father died of a heart attack when you were fifteen? Me too – my dad also died of a heart attack when I was fifteen. People think, “Heart attack, you go to hospital, and you get better, and life goes on, but that’s not always what happens”.’
“I’ve realised he knew that what I needed was to sit in a car talking for hours about stuff. He could tell I was going through something and needed to talk about the subject, or around the subject, or not about the subject at all.”
David can’t remember if they did talk much about his dad, but he does remember that just knowing this older guy had shared his experience, understood what was hard for other people to understand, proved his feelings weren’t abnormal. That was something, he says.
Actually, that was a lot. Through his discussions with this man, David realised that his dad had been previously hospitalised with heart issues, but that he and his sisters weren’t told the truth.
“That was about five, six months before he died, back when I started staying with him on weekends. He was a lifelong smoker and there were nights where he’d spend the entire night coughing. One weekday morning his girlfriend called to say he’d been in hospital overnight because he’d had a ‘bad asthma attack’. I remember at the time thinking, ‘This is bullshit – it sounds like he’s had a heart attack’. My mother’s journal has since confirmed that, yes, that was a heart attack but he’d downplayed the seriousness even to her. So, his death wasn’t completely out of the blue. Although for us it was.”
One advantage of working in theatre, maybe, is that David can – and does – fold his experiences into his work. And sometimes very closely.
“For my first production of Hamlet, in 2002, I found it retraumatising-slash-elating-slash-cathartic-slash-enough to be directing other actors. Whereas for my 2006 production I absolutely felt like Dad’s ghost was in the room with me. This production had no costumes, no set, no props, and harsh lighting. What I discovered was, in this sort of non-illusionistic production, the potential for the brain to see everything is so much more heightened. There becomes a major difference between what you’re watching and what you’re seeing. In this environment, I could absolutely see my father’s ghost in the room. That was a very useful cathartic experience.
“My last production of Hamlet was in 2019 while Mum was dying. That show was made very much from the point of me realising, and saying directly to the company, that the worst thing in my life is also responsible for some of the best things in my life – including finding Shakespeare. Maybe on one hand I’m prostituting the death of my father for a career payoff, but it’s also the universe’s strange gift to me.
“I’ve always been a glass half full person, and I’ve always thought the purpose of art is to turn shit into gold, that an artist’s work is to transform awful experiences into something useful for other people as well as yourself. Even Shakespeare did it – he transformed the death of his father and of his young son into something worthwhile in his plays, including Hamlet.”
Story by Lee-Anne Duncan