.
“Frankly, we didn’t swear that much,” she said, laughing. “But there were a lot of home truths in it.”
Actress Jennifer Ward-Lealand, who played the older version of Clark, and playwright Fiona Samuels previously told RNZ they’d be nervous if she was there on opening night, but wouldn’t want to know ahead.
“Well, I hope they didn’t know,” Clark said in response.
“But I thought they did a great job… and it wasn’t just playing the younger and the older Helen. They played so many characters, male and female, old and young. So, really a sterling performance and we should give them a big hand.”
Actress Jennifer Ward-Lealand as Helen Clark
Auckland Theatre Company
On the moment she wore trousers to a state banquet for the Queen on her visit to New Zealand, Clark said she didn’t think there would have been a problem.
“But you had this very stuffy British media that followed the Queen … they took offence at it, and said it was an outrage and a breach of protocol.
“And apparently, in their views, protocol meant that unless the Queen wore trousers, no one else could. She actually wore trousers quite a lot as well, a great horse rider and so on.
“But I remember when this came up, I quipped back, ‘I thought we were living in the 21st century, not the 15th’, or something to that effect, which just got them even madder, really.”
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Asked about any part that may have been tough to watch, she named the portrayal of family divisions.
“All things heal in time, and as I say, my parents became my greatest supporters.”
Her father died about five months ago, she said, and she spent the past five and a half years looking after him with her sister.
“We had a lot that we disagreed about, but in the end, blood’s thicker than water.
“And I think Fiona [Samuels] picked that up a little bit with the story about the car, that Dad would always put his family first, and eventually, of course, when he retired from the farm and began mixing with a wider cross-section of society, he became the greatest supporter of Labour at Waihi Beach.”
When Clark was elected in 1981, the number of women in Parliament doubled from 4 to 8. Although progress was under way for greater representation, “it was very slow progress and hard going”.
Today, female politicians still face gendered attacks, she said.
“The attacks change a bit. I mean, I was attacked for never having children. And Jacinda was attacked for having a child.
“I think there is still a disproportionate amount of criticism and very gendered criticism of women who get to the top.
“Perhaps at the level below that ministerial, not so much. But when you get to the top, then people are looking for what’s the angle they can get you at. And it’s often a gendered angle.”
Helen Clark in Six Outfits
