Trousdell, Alexander
He came from Britain in 1957 where he was policy planning director of a London advertising agency. He came to New Zealand, he says, so that his children could grow up in a classless society. His daughter and two sons are now married to New Zealanders. His wife is a Scot, from Dunfermline in Fifeshire, a physiotherapist who has worked at Silverstream Hospital for more than 12 years.
Trousdell has been managing director of Marketing Consultant Services (N.Z.) Ltd, since 1964. In 1940 he was commissioned in the (Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment). He served for most of the war; after 1940, in the Middle East, mostly on special duty, first in intelligence and later in political and then psychological warfare.
He was finally Head of Propaganda Services in the joint U.K./U.S.A. Psychological Warfare Bureau covering the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean. He first acted “for a lark,” in a services variety concert — Christmas 1940 —at the Cairo Opera House. Shortly after arriving in New Zealand he appeared in a production of “Waters of the Moon”; produced by Davina Whitehouse.
He has been working for the Radio Drama Dept of the N.Z.B.C. since 1960 “just as much as possible,” and has appeared occasionally in Downstage and TV Drama productions.
In one year, recently, he worked for 42 weeks out of the 52 at Wellington’s Downstage rehearsing and appearing in productions like “Inadmissable Evidence,” “Ghosts,” “Misalliance” and “Twentysix Efforts at Pornography.”
He was in the first episode of the first “Pukemanu” series. He was Wellington branch secretary of Actors’ Equity for two years and a member of the National Board during that time.
Alex Trousdell wrote a short series of nine-minute dramas for “On Camera” based on two fictional characters “Adam and Emma” living in Greytown in 1893. All the facts were utterly factual; only the characters imaginary. “I’d like nothing better than to work like that for the rest of my time,” he says. He prefers to write about reality and regrets that this takes too much time in research to make it economic.
Trousdell believes that New Zealand drama will not fulfil its function until after its writers and producers have somehow managed to make the whole nation see and understand the "rugged, hard - working many - sided story of the last 150 years; the stories that have made us what we are today”.
He cannot see how any multi-racial society can have and share a common dream about the future, until each different culture has learnt to understand and share the dreams that have activated the others in the past.
He says, “Our writers will have to be clever; they’ll have to tell us the truth about the past and yet still find the common ground on which we all can walk in the future.”
