Alan Cumming: "It's not a difficult concept, acting. You just have to pretend to be someone - and mean it." Photo / Nick Reed
Alan Cumming: "It's not a difficult concept, acting. You just have to pretend to be someone - and mean it." Photo / Nick Reed
"Certain things I didn't experience as a child I've made part of my adult life. Which I think is a healthy thing to do."
That was actor, writer and self-described "Scottish elf trapped in middle-aged man's body" Alan Cumming, talking to a capacity festival crowd at the ASB Theatre about his appalling childhood.
Acting, he said, is a form of play: the thing his abusive father made impossible for him as a child is now at the heart of his career.
"The teaching of acting, especially in America, is so clouded with technique. Alan, they ask me, what's your process? I'm not a cheese; I don't have a process. It's not a difficult concept, acting. You just have to pretend to be someone - and mean it."
Sir Peter Williams, QC, may be ill but he found the energy to deliver a strong message at the festival: we need to treat all suspects fairly and convicted criminals humanely.
He called the country's paltry legal aid "pathetic", worried about occasional police cruelty and corruption, and condemned New Zealand's high rate of incarceration in "claustrophobic cages": "We've got lockup-itis in this country."
Yesterday's session exemplified Sir Peter's own declaration that "you can't beat a good criminal lawyer for good company".
He said law graduates could either chase money and become fancy dandies or they could follow a vocation.
Fuelled by a lifelong anger about injustice, Sir Peter found himself defending "the vagabonds, prostitutes, sly groggers and bookmakers ... I found myself at home, really," he laughed.
The only New Zealand barrister to overturn a verdict by copying an episode of Ironside and polling a jury, he regretted getting his clients off charges "only when they didn't pay me". But he does regret not attending more theatre.
In his career Sir Peter Williams found himself defending "the vagabonds, prostitutes, sly groggers and bookmakers ... I found myself at home, really." Photo / Michael Craig
Elsewhere, Guardian journalist Nick Davies was funny, quick and smartly entertaining about breaking the Murdoch newspaper hacking scandal. He pointed out that News Corp remains powerful, and still scares British politicians: "It's depressing, really. Shall we tell jokes?"
He noted that media habitually pretend excitement about the royals. But he saw the "frenzy" around Prince Harry in Christchurch: "You're a bigger crowd - I'm beating him!" Davies told the audience.
He suggested, as fast-churn news is ubiquitous, that newspapers should instead publish brilliant columns, long reads and investigations.
In a measured, sensible discussion on the critic as art interpreter, Wystan Curnow mentioned that art collectors are not very interested in art criticism: "It bothers me a little and maybe that's because we're in competition. I want to possess the work by writing about it. They ... just pay for the work and take it home."
Self-described "storian" (storytelling historian), strong feminist and former Wallaby lock Peter FitzSimons, in his trademark pirate red bandanna, gave an entertaining lecture, complete with sound effects, on the ill-advised Gallipoli disaster.
After a truce was called to bury the dead, the Turks lobbed a gift of cigarettes over to their "heroic enemies". The bully beef sent in return was not so well appreciated.
Emily St John Mandel addressed the question of whether literary life is under threat in our brave new technological world. "Reading has become obsolete in the same way radio and bicycles have become obsolete. Which is to say not at all."
Mandel can speak about changing times with some authority, having just won this year's Arthur C. Clarke award for her "nice, polite apocalypse novel", Station Eleven.
"It drives me crazy that some people find the book too polite. I mean, I did kill off 99 per cent of the global population. I'm not sure how much further I can go."
Interviewed onstage by a well-prepared Jolisa Gracewood, Mandel talked about the relationship of genre fiction and literary fiction, "whatever that is - I've set out to write literary fiction, but with the strongest possible narrative drive" - and mentioned in passing that Station Eleven's vivid depiction of a terrible plague spread by air travel has proved a problem for a certain subset of readers.
Other highlights of day one: novelist and short story writer Amy Bloom, well paired with hyper-enthusiastic local bookseller Carole Beu - "I'm not going anywhere without her", said Bloom after Beu exhorted the audience to buy her books - spoke about the differences between writing novels and stories. "You can recover from a tedious digression in a novel. In a story you only have so much space. You don't want to waste any of it".
Legendary Australian writer Helen Garner drew a large crowd. Initially quiet and uncertain-seeming, she slowly became more expansive, drawing the audience into a shattering and moving account of the terrible crime story she covers in her latest book. On stage she projects an unusual combination of empathy and mental toughness - both necessary qualities if you want to observe a long-running criminal trial, she explained. "If you can get through the boredom barrier that tends to set in 20 minutes into a court session, it opens out into a phantasmagorical world of interesting human behaviour ... I could spent my whole life in a courtroom."
Legendary Australian writer Helen Garner. Photo / Supplied
