Greg McGee

Greg McGee is a New Zealand writer and playwright.

McGee was born in 1950 in the South Island town of Oamaru. In his early 20s McGee played rugby as a Junior All Black and became an All Black trialist. He graduated from the University of Otago with a law degree in 1972.

In 1980 his first play, Foreskin's Lament, a drama set in rugby changing rooms and at the after-match party, became an immediate success. The play shows the player nicknamed "Foreskin" and his attempt to fit in with university liberals and with rugby-playing conservatives. In New Zealand a rugby player is an everyman, and the game and play present a model of society in the end of the 1970s on the eve of the 1981 Springbok Tour. The play has a stylistically unusual ending, with the main character directly addressing the audience with a very long speech — or rather interrogation — questioning their own values: "Whaddarya?".

McGee script-wrote for television, notably two mini-series: Erebus: The Aftermath (an examination of the inquiry following the crash of Air New Zealand Flight 901 in Antarctica) and Fallout (a dramatisation of David Lange's government and the end of ANZUS). He also produced work for shows such as Cover Story, Marlin Bay, Street Legal and, more recently, Orange Roughies. He co-wrote movie scripts for Crooked Earth, Via Satellite (1998), with Anthony McCarten and the Kiwi Welsh rugby comedy Old Scores with Dean Parker. He returned to the theatre with This Train I'm On in 1999. Foreskin's Lament is being reprised for the screen as Skin and Bone.

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