After The Party is an award-winning New Zealand drama about abuse allegations starring Robyn Malcolm

After The Party is being celebrated as one of New Zealand’s best shows ever. It was created from actor Robyn Malcolm’s (centre) frustration at the roles on offer for middle-aged women. (Supplied: ABC iview)

Even though you’ll finish the six episodes of After The Party knowing the definitive truth, while watching you’ll constantly question whether protagonist Penny’s accusation of child abuse towards her husband is justified.

Co-creator Robyn Malcolm, who plays Penny, says the show was a “real water cooler [moment]” when it aired in New Zealand late last year. She says it was unlike anything she’d experienced across her more than 30-year career.

“My bank manager rang me after about episode three and just said, ‘I need to know what happens. Is she right? What if I dropped the mortgage?'”, says Malcolm, adding, “She rang me two or three times, it was hilarious.”

After The Party is predominantly set five years after Penny finds husband and fellow high-school teacher Phil (Peter Mullan) upstairs at his birthday party in their Wellington home in a compromising position with his daughter’s teenage friend Ollie (Ian Blackburn).

But with details blurry and many drinks consumed, their friends believe Phil’s assertion that he was simply helping someone in need. Penny is doggedly persistent, however, and Phil is unable to stay in Wellington.

Five years later, he returns home to take up a job and help their daughter (Tara Canton) with her own child, and Penny has a choice: let it lie, or continue ostracising herself in the name of what she sees as the simple, awful truth.

She cannot help but pull and pull at the few threads to community she has, even if she’s left alone at the end.

“I admire her courage – to keep going and keep trying,” says Malcolm. “No matter what, she really doesn’t care what people think. I admire that because I give a shit.”

Touching upon ideas of who gets to seek justice and which voices are heard, After The Party has been celebrated for its moral complexity and performances from the cast.

New Zealand critics have championed it as “a stunning achievement” and one of the country’s finest shows and, in March, Malcolm’s performance won Best Actress in the International Panorama at France’s Séries Mania, an international TV festival.

“I’m crossing my fingers for Australia,” she says. “I think they’ll get it. The French did!”

While Malcolm might be one of New Zealand’s most beloved actors – best known as criminal matriarch Cheryl West in Outrageous Fortune – Penny is not a particularly warm or kind character.

Her strength can lapse into pathetic stubbornness, represented by her decision to exclusively cycle Wellington’s notorious hills and against its worse winds. She is a self-flagellating environmentalist who arrives grumpy, sweaty and tired to every other scene.

“I love characters who are clowns, even in tragedy,” says Malcolm.

“When I did Upper Middle Bogan with Glenn Robbins, he said whenever he would do courses about how to write comedy, he would say to them ‘go to the saddest, darkest place in your life and start there, because it’ll always be funny’.”

Malcolm says she’s drawn to the comedy within “desperately miserable or angry” moments, and Penny brings those aplenty — whether it’s shamelessly bribing her grandson with sugar and toys, acting out via vandalism, swearing at her students or simply making terrible decisions. It’s delightfully painful and full of cringe comedy, but always with empathy for Penny.

“She’s got armour, everywhere,” says Malcolm. “She’s battling and fighting and not being vulnerable, blaming everybody else, being an asshole to her daughter and her friends.”

That prickliness makes it all the easier for viewers to question Penny’s claims as a defensive double-down, and for her community to outright dismiss them as vindictive lies.

It’s a role Malcolm, 59, says she and writer Dianne Taylor created out of frustration at a lack of complex roles for middle-aged women. Citing Olive Kitteridge, The Mother and The Mayor of Easttown as a few positive examples, she says the two wanted to depict a “real, post-menopausal, middle-aged woman” on-screen.

“As women get older, the range of characters that you get to play becomes narrower,” she says.

“You’re either some twisted matriarch or a f***up, a failure, a bunny boiler or you’re an old crony witch… Or, if you’re the good person, you’ve got to wear white and giggle a lot. You’ve got to be a bit girly, so that everyone goes phew ‘She’s not a witch!’.

“I’ve gone through a period where I was auditioning for characters my own age, and I was losing the roles to women in their 30s,” she adds, calling the trend aspirational casting.

“We wanted to dig under the hood of that – and then we thought, ‘well, let’s deliberately make Penny somebody that a network would find really unpalatable.'”

After The Party is predominantly a tense watch, but moments of pause come when Penny acts as a life model – a series of scenes that Malcolm and Taylor fought to keep in, with networks arguing they didn’t match the show’s pace.

But they felt it was important to portray a middle-aged body as beautiful outside of sex scenes, and to show Penny with her guard down, tears often welling in the moment, even if she doesn’t quite understand why.

“I don’t think she knows why she does it, I think she just does it,” says Malcolm. “But I know why.”

“So many women who are 50+ talk about being invisible, Penny would be no exception. I think she does [life drawing] to be visible – the irony is she’s working incredibly hard in the rest of her life to not be seen.”

After The Party airs each Sunday at 8.30pm on ABC TV beginning April 28, with all episodes available to stream on ABC iview.