KEY POINTS:
What: The Pillowman
Where and when: Maidment Theatre, Aug 23-Sep 13
Jonathan Hardy has spent 48 of his 67 years appearing in, writing or directing stories about other people's lives; he was even nominated for an Oscar in 1981 for co-writing the script for Australian film Breaker Morant.
But he wants to tell his own story when we meet at the Auckland Theatre Company's rehearsal rooms. Back from his home in the southern highlands of New South Wales, Wellington-born Hardy plays police interrogator/torturer Tupolski in Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman.
Hardy says the play's broad themes - the stifling of creative expression supposedly for the greater good and the sins of the fathers being visited on the sons - have a resonance in his own life.
Born in 1940, he never met his father who died on the World War II battlefields of Crete, leaving a pregnant wife behind. Before he left, Hardy senior made his wife sign a pledge that their child would not be raised a Catholic.
Hardy's mother reneged and his early years were dominated by Catholic pomp, ceremony and, he says, guilt, recrimination and confusion.
At 13, he was sent to a seminary south of Auckland. "It was psychotic, the pressure put on us to deny basic human nature," he says. " It was like a totalitarian state, something which features prominently in this play."
Hardy was expelled three years later amid allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct.
Was there, I ask? "Probably but not as much as they thought. I mean, what could anyone expect? Teenage boys are groaning with sexual behaviour, inappropriate or otherwise."
Expulsion was equally disconcerting. Hardy confesses he did not know how to earn a living, or relate to many [non-Catholic] people or deal with his nascent homosexuality.
Then he met a former school friend who had joined the New Zealand Players' Drama School and suggested Hardy audition. Within four years, he had found his calling and was appearing on the British stage with the likes of Sir John Gielgud and Sir Laurence Olivier.
As well as The Pillowman concentrating Hardy's thoughts on bygone years, an old school friend is terminally ill. It is a situation which leads to reflections about life and death.
But it is not the first-time Hardy has confronted his own mortality. As well as being a veteran statesman of Australasia's performing arts, he is also one of the region's longest-living heart transplant recipients.
Hardy received a new heart in 1988, nine years after developing arteriosclerosis which caused two heart attacks and led to two quadruple bypasses.
He says it is a great privilege to have lived to see New Zealand's performing arts community mature.
He was the first New Zealander appointed artistic director of the Mercury Theatre and oversaw operations from 1980-85. "I remember the building when it was the Playhouse. It was a ghastly place; no one wanted to perform there. I swear we all got typhoid from the water; there were turds floating around open drains in the dressing rooms.
"I took the job on because when I left New Zealand in 1962, it had been with the intention of returning to teach, to bring back what I had learned overseas. I stopped in Australia and stayed there until the Mercury appointment."
Hardy turned the theatre around but it broke his heart, figuratively and literally.
Ill-health forced his resignation and he returned to Australia to continue working in theatre, film and television.
He may have been far away but the 1992 closure of the Mercury still hurt.
"It was a great crime that Auckland lost the Mercury; it robbed the whole country of a great institution and it should not have been allowed to happen. I am thankful for Simon Prast who, like a phoenix from the ashes, bravely set about ensuring this city was not without a theatre company. I am very proud of what he has achieved."
The Pillowman marks Hardy's third association with playwright Martin McDonagh and renews his ties to the ATC. He starred in The Cripple of Inishmaan in 1999 and directed The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 2000.
More recently, Hardy has made a name among a new generation of fans, playing Dominar Rygel XVI in the sci-fi action series Farscape.
"In my own pathetic way I suppose I feel I have been part of something quite special. New Zealand now expresses itself through its theatre and its films compared to when I started and all we did was work from somewhere else.
"Take film: we are not making second-rate American-type films but films like Whale Rider, that are a unique expression and celebration of New Zealand. I don't think a film like that could have been made anywhere else in the world. I would like to see it all continue and coalesce, particularly with funding being put into smaller ventures.
"I firmly believe that theatre is a seminal part of all this. The likes of Peter Jackson do not come out of nowhere. They have small beginnings and they need support, encouragement.
"Isaac Newton said, 'If ever I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants' and that, I believe, is the case with most ventures."
