Posted by ChrisB | October 30, 2022
In 1927, a young member of the Wanganui Operatic Society told a judge and jury that, in the dressing room of the city’s opera house, a man named Trezise introduced him to the ‘habit’ of ‘handling other men’. Theo Trezise was a well-known, well-connected, and flamboyant figure at a time when public discussion of homosexuality was mostly confined to the pages of Truth newspaper. A homoerotic culture was taking shape in New Zealand, however, and artistic men like Theo played an important role in it.
Born in England in 1882, Theo travelled to New Zealand with his mother as a young boy. He grew up in Wellington and worked as a civil servant before heading back overseas to train in opera and musical comedy in London. He served as a sapper (a field engineer) in Egypt, France and Belgium during the First World War. When his injuries took him away from the battlefield he joined the Kiwis, an army entertainment unit based in France. He sang, danced, and produced several shows. Here is a comrade’s description of Theo's stage getup:
The long train of Trezise’s beautiful frock was fixed throughout its entire length, from the hem to the back of the neck, with dome fasteners; and when he retired, after bowing solemnly to the applause, the whole back portion of the dress stripped off, with results that may be better imagined than described.
Trezise’s performing troupe at Nieppe, 15 August 1917. Left to right in the front row: George Lyttleton, Stuart Nelson, Theo Trezise, Ike Richardson.
Theo returned to New Zealand four years after the war began, and music historian Chris Bourke describes him as ‘perhaps the best-dressed man to promenade down Wellington’s Lambton Quay’. In 1920 he began a new business venture, the Cabaret Club in Goring Street, Thorndon. The loud jazz music and visitors’ cars drove the neighbours crazy, and they ‘hinted at unseemly displays’, but the club’s defenders hit back. This was a post-theatre dancing club for respectable Wellingtonians, they said. Besides, Theo was sublime on the piano. ‘All the assemblage got up and jazzed to it, foxtrotted to it, shimmied to it’. Theo and Lady Anna Stout, a prominent social reformer and wife of Chief Justice Robert Stout, arranged a dance for officers from the British battleship Renown.
In 1910, ten years before she met Theo and his friends, Anna Stout told a newspaper that ‘we have no class of men who are effeminate in dress or intellect or degenerate in morals, as in old countries’, but by 1925 Truth newspaper complained loudly about bohemian ‘homosexualists’ who practice ‘deliberate perversion under the cloak of art’. No doubt Theo made the acquaintance of other men as he travelled the country with his operas, plays and stage shows: Oscar Wilde’s A Florentine Tragedy, Tristan und Isolde, Queen of Sheba, A Country Girl, and The Arcadians. He appeared in the latter, an exuberant musical comedy, ‘as a faun, with Miss Maida Meuli as his partner in the role of a wood nymph and the support of a graceful ballet of elves’. Theo performed in a succession of romantic roles with glamorous female co-stars.
Left: Theo in about 1920. Right: acting with Miss Linda McIntyre in Paolo and Francesca, a tale of a medieval Italian noblewoman who had an affair with her brother-in-law.
Theo often travelled overseas during the steamship era. In 1920, ‘at the request of the Prince of Wales’, he left for Australia ‘where he will be a guest of the Renown during the whole time the battleship will be in Australian waters’. He conducted ‘an extensive tour of the capitals of Europe’ in 1924 and returned with the costumes for a military pageant back home; he also spent time in America. Theo became something of a minor celebrity, and the newspapers told of his travels around New Zealand by car, train and ferry as he produced shows for dramatic groups around the country - including in Whanganui where he lingered in the Opera House dressing rooms. Others in the industry lauded his work. After a performance of A Country Girl in Auckland, Theo was raised aloft by two of the cast and carried onto the stage where he gave ‘a neat little speech’ to the audience while sitting on the men’s shoulders.
Left: An immaculately dressed Theo when he produced the musical comedy Florodora in Gisborne in 1924. Right: Neville Renaud, Musical Director of the New Plymouth production of A Country Girl, September 1931, with Theo who directed the opera.
‘Theo Trezise’s charisma meant he could get away with a lot’, Bourke writes enigmatically. Although he was named in a court case in connection with homosexual offences, his own sexuality never caused him any trouble with the authorities. Theo’s only brushes with the law reflected his sub-par skills as a motorist. He kept running off the road in Hawera, and police charged him with ‘negligent driving’ in Auckland’s Queen Street.
Theo’s international travels continued. In 1932, accompanied by his mother, he left New Zealand for a new job at the Elstree movie studio near London where he became a director and producer. But he continued to shuttle between the northern and southern hemispheres. This ‘man of many parts’, as a newspaper writer called him, lived in both Auckland and London during the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. He died in 1977, in a Wiltshire rest home, at the grand old age of 94.
Sources:
Ancestry.com [with thanks to Rachel Sonius at Puke Ariki].
Newspapers [in which Theo's last name appears as both Trezise and Tresize]: Auckland Star, 4 June 1920, 17 November 1922; 18 August 1926; Free Lance, 29 September 1920; Hawera Star, 23 September 1927, 28 September 1927; Hawke’s Bay Tribune, 25 February 1924; Nelson Evening Mail, 29 October 1927; New Zealand Herald, 17 October 1921, New Zealand Times, 15 May 1920; NZ Truth, 28 March 1925; Wairarapa Daily Times, 14 January 1932.
Army record for Theodore Trezise, WW1 4/135a, Archives New Zealand [view]
Bourke, C. Good-bye Maoriland: The Songs and Sounds of New Zealand’s Great War, pp. 200-201.
Diamond, P. Downfall: The Destruction of Charles Mackay, p. 104.
Eldred-Grigg, S. Pleasures of the Flesh, p. 169.
Lawlor, P. Confessions of a Journalist, Auckland, 1935, p. 88.
McKinlay, E. Ways and By-Ways of a Singing Kiwi with the N.Z. Divisional Entertainers in France, p. 83.