What: Ruben Guthrie.
Where: Herald Theatre.
When: September 18-October 17.
The statistics make for grim reading: misusing alcohol, the most common drug in New Zealand, costs millions each year.
According to police, 31 per cent of reported crimes in 2007/08 were committed when the offender had been drinking, while hospitals report a staggering 70 per cent of admissions to A&E departments are related to alcohol. One in four women cannot remember what they did when they were drinking.
So can the subject of alcoholism and binge drinking be funny?
When Australian playwright and actor Brendan Cowell explored Australia's notorious binge drinking culture, he wanted to get the audience thinking. So he adopted the tried and true technique and got 'em laughing.
Cowell devised a larger-than-life character and a story laced with hilarity and became the toast of Sydney's theatre scene. His play, the black comedy Ruben Guthrie, sold out before its 2008 debut and again in 2009 when it transferred to a bigger space.
Now Silo Theatre is bringing it to Auckland for the second ever production of the show in the world. Like Cowell, who will be in the audience for opening night, Silo's artistic director Shane Bosher hopes it will entertain but provoke soul-searching among those who see it.
The set-up goes something like this: Ruben Guthrie lives a lifestyle that could be ripped from the pages of an upmarket glossy magazine. He's 29, creative director of the hottest advertising agency in town and lives in a fashionable apartment with a Czech supermodel several years his junior. He also likes a drink - or 20.
Winning awards, getting the girls and generally living the life, Ruben is rapidly coming to believe his own press. Feeling invincible, he leaps off a hotel roof one night and lands in a whole lot of trouble when he drunkenly mistakes the baby pool for a full-size one.
Exit the girlfriend and welcome a plaster cast on the broken arm, bruises and various abrasions and a visit to Alcoholics Anonymous.
Ruben thinks he can win back the girl if he swears off the sauce for a month or two and attends a few meetings but gradually he starts to realise maybe his life is as shallow as the baby pool he landed in.
Oliver Driver plays Ruben and given that he's still fronting TV3's breakfast show Sunrise, which means 4.30am starts, his lifestyle couldn't be further from the character. Driver's watching what he eats, going to the gym, taking naps and not drinking.
Starting on Sunrise last year, Driver declared he wanted to direct and appear in a play each year even if it meant early starts and late nights.
"I love what I do on Sunrise but I still get excited about theatre. I love coming into this shitty rehearsal room with a group of actors and trying to work out how to do this play. There's not a second of doubt or of wanting out. Theatre is such a rush. It's such a great feeling in front of an audience."
Driver doesn't want any obstacles in the way of a stellar performance in a play which he says is highly topical given the continued focus on alcohol, thanks to headlines about teenage binge drinking and the release of the Law Commission's discussion document Alcohol in Our Lives.
Not drinking is proving particularly useful as quasi-research into the reactions Ruben experiences when he tells acquaintances, friends and colleagues he's going teetotal. The people Ruben expects support and encouragement from suddenly seem to be suspicious and wary of him.
Driver says the play highlights a glaring contradiction in modern society.
"No one wants you to be an alcoholic but when you announce you're not drinking, it becomes something of a moral issue. People start to feel uncomfortable around you because they think you are judging them and their drinking.
"When you're not drinking, you become something of an outsider and your stance - for whatever reason - raises questions like, 'what's wrong with drinking' and 'is there something wrong with me if I'm drinking and you're not'. As [actor] Peter Elliott says, it's an odd society when we have to anaesthetise ourselves to socialise."
Driver describes Ruben Guthrie as a "real Silo play" in that it is confronting, modern and involves the audience in the story. Artistic director Shane Bosher says it continues the company's aim of opening a dialogue with its audience, provoking while entertaining.
Bosher and Driver reunite as actor and director for the first-time since Neil Labute's Bash in 2004. Elliott, Dean O'Gorman, Toni Potter, Ellis Smith, Andrew Grainger and Chelsie Preston Crayford star with Driver.
