A face hidden by its many guises

By MICHELE HEWITSON

As we are waiting for Stuart Devenie, a rumpled-looking man wanders into view. He's got stubble and his hair is sticking up.

This is helpful. Because, despite having seen Devenie onstage last Saturday, I have no clear idea of what he looks like. Today he looks something like Danny Moffat, his character in the Auckland Theatre Company production of Tom Scott's play The Daylight Atheist.

Devenie is one of our greatest actors, yet his face is hard to fix in your mind. He has next to no public profile. That is partly what makes him so good.

He says: "You have to get out of the way. I think every body should only have one ego in it. And if you're in there, there's not enough room for the character."

Danny Moffat is a big character. A blowhard. A nasty drunk. He's declared war on his family. He's marooned in a room full of junk. He is an accomplished story teller.

Devenie loves him. "Every single character you play, you have to enter into their humanity. It doesn't matter if they're Macbeth or Moliere's Miser."

He played The Miser many years ago "with a Scots accent and no teeth and he was absolutely revolting and the audience loved him". He plays the miser for me: with a Scots accent and the illusion of no teeth. He is absolutely revolting, and instantly loveable.

The archives of his memory are catalogued with voices.

Devenie is not supposed to be talking too much. His voice is rough because The Daylight Atheist is a one-man play and Danny is a man who never stops talking.

From the moment we pick up Devenie, he doesn't stop talking. In the car, on the way to the Maidment Theatre to have his photo taken, he talks. About the wind in Wellington, where he used to live, about how you get to know the different winds like friends. About the rain in Whangarei, where he spends half the year.

He talks about a show, Puppetry of the Penis, and wonders whether he'll go and see it. I tell him it's a franchise and he says, "Oh, yes. Kentucky Fried Penis".

Rasp, rasp, he laughs like a hacksaw.

At the theatre he sits on the stage. I sit in the front row. The price of admission to this solo show is the occasional question.

He talks about the attitudes that shaped a man like Danny Moffat. About a time when men and women led separate lives: him down the pub or in the shed, her in the kitchen. They didn't know how to talk to each other, he says.

As a kid growing up in Hastings Devenie watched his parents not talk to each other. His father was a barman who suffered from the traditional barman's curse of proximity to the drink. His mother held down two jobs, as a housemaid and in a drycleaners. She read a lot. But, "you can do all the reading in the world and it's not going to help you when you're making the beds".

His father left, ended up in a boarding house. Devenie would visit him, until, at the age of 11 he thought, "I can't go on like this".

He had become "a sort of battlefield". He didn't see his father again for a decade. But Devenie would hear that his father had come to see his son on stage: "He came and looked and went."

Like Danny's, "it's not an individual story".

Devenie's individual story goes like this: he was accepted for Drama School in the early 70s. He decided to go to university. The Herald Tribune ran a story: Hastings Actor Snubs Drama School.

He started at the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation in 1975, as a trainee producer, on April Fool's Day. He did radio drama for three years before being seconded to the sports department.

Briefly. "What a missed opportunity to destroy television sport," he laments. Twenty-five years ago he went to London "a New Zealander and came back a Pakeha".

There he joined a repertory company which put on "terrible old pot boilers", and employed "terrible actors".

He takes off a director: "At this point, Stuart, come down the stairs and go through the French doors."

"Well, Imogen," he says in his best luvvie voice, "we haven't got any French doors."

He has been a jobbing actor, acting tutor and director ever since. He's 51. He wanted to become an actor "because it was possible".

Devenie's unscripted one-man play follows no linear narrative. Other voices pop up, characters he's played, or met. When he talks about his mum, you can see her putting on her hat and full makeup to go down the shops to get the bread.

And here's Devenie playing himself, in letter-writing mode, penning one of his little savage satires (see today's letters page).

He once wrote to a television channel after watching a thing called When Good Pets Go Bad. "You think: how life enhancing." He suggested they commission him to make a series called When Good Plants Go Bad.

H E IS uncommonly fond of egging on the badly behaved. He likes to write to politicians suggesting ever more outrageous acts of idiocy.

He signs his own name but "sometimes I take on a slightly different voice".

He has been taking on different voices for 31 years. It is a privilege, he says, "to have experienced all these different lives". He can't read fiction - his wife, Gillian, jokes that his idea of a coffee-table book is The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. "I spend so much of my life in a fantasy land I have to read the most appallingly dry books you can imagine."

He makes such good stories out of life, you imagine he has little use for novels.

Here's one: A critic once wrote of Devenie, in the role of Frankenfurter in the Rocky Horror Show, that he had spindly legs. The same critic wrote that Mark Hadlow, as Riff Raff, was too fat for the role. The next night, in a scene where Devenie had to wrest a whip from Hadlow, Hadlow refused to give it up. "Give me the whip, Fatty," Devenie improvised, loudly.

It's not just a funny yarn. It's told to illustrate that the first casualty in the perennial theatre-versus-the-critics debate is a sense of humour. He never responds to reviews, "the audience tells me either way".

On a theatre noticeboard is a caricature of him by Tom Scott. He thinks it's wonderful, but "I don't think I have great big Dr Spock ears like that".

Well, he might. I wouldn't know. The moment he leaves, I'm unable to fix in my mind what he looks like.