Roger Hall
Roger Hall is New Zealand's most prolific playwright.
He wrote his first play, Glide Time, over thirty years ago in 1976. He has been writing a stage play every year since then, including musicals and pantomimes.
Along with Glide Time, his best known plays are Middle Age Spread (which ran for 15 months in London's West End and won the Comedy of the Year award), Market Forces, Take a Chance on Me, Spreading Out, Taking Off and the stage muscial version of Footrot Flats. In addition, he has written numerous plays and series for radio, and for television several plays and more than sixty half-hour sitcom episodes including Gliding Off, Spin Doctors and, for UK Television, Conjugal Rites.
He first went to Africa in 1995 to follow the All Blacks at the World Cup to research his stage play C'Mon Black and became aware first hand of the terrible poverty and harsh living circumstances that many Africans suffer. More recently, he was asked to go to Uganda to travel through that country for the TV series Intrepid Journeys.
"Life is so very difficult for many Africans. Just getting water into the home involved carrying heavy cans of water several miles - and children had to carry their share of it, too. Hard physical work day after day for something we take for granted. I saw, too, the indirect affect of AIDS with young girls having to be rescued off the streets having been orphaned by their parents dying from that illness. It's a scourge that will affect several generations."
