Beefcakes breathe new life into strip

By GREG DIXON

"Look what I'm reduced to," bellows Stuart Devenie as he stumbles up the stairs from the dance studio. "I've been in this business for 30 years and look what I'm reduced to."

Crikey. Could this be the end for one of the best actors of his generation, the final curtain-call for a fine career?

Well, what he has been reduced to is this: camping his heart out as the cast of the Auckland Theatre Company's new production of Ladies Night run through the moves of the show's bells and catcalls finale. This to a booming soundtrack of It's Raining Men.

Devenie is joking, of course. His big smile, as he reaches for his pack of fags, tells me he is having terrific fun. But he is also sweating rather a lot, suggesting the ciggie might not be such a good idea.

"Too old for Hamlet, too young for Lear," he wails, all faux lament, before disappearing downstairs at the central Auckland studios and outside for a smoke.

It's the final week of rehearsal for this new production of the play about a bunch of mechanics who decide to earn a little cash by stripping, but you would hardly know it.

If Devenie seems relaxed, the rest of the cast - which includes The Strip's Robbie Magasiva, Mercy Peak's Sara Wiseman and Naked Samoan David Fane - seem equally laidback as they prepare for the ATC's annual whizzbang season finale.

Laughter punctuates this rehearsal, and director Oliver Driver seems more intent on talking about the evils of critics than watching his players dance. His dog, a friendly thing, even settles down to sleep against a wall of the studio when Driver eventually heads in to see how things are progressing.

But the air of easiness is disguising the hard work - and that this is no standard version of one of our most successful plays.

The comic crowd-pleaser - written by Stephen Sinclair and Anthony McCarten 16 years ago - has been given a good going over, a revision, for its month-long season at Auckland's Sky City Theatre.

With McCarten now in Britain, the task fell to Sinclair, and he took the opportunity to develop some of the individual storylines. The show will be more satisfying in terms of its dramatic arc, Sinclair says, and Driver has had a rethink on the staging, now setting much of the drama in a backyard.

"Oliver is also really grounding it as a naturalistic comedy, which I'm pleased about," says Sinclair. "I think it works best when it's naturalistic. There have been productions which have gone for broad comedy, which I think spoils it."

Sinclair and McCarten met at a playwrights' workshop in 1986 and became fast friends. The following year they decided to write a play together, and hit on the idea of a group of blokes becoming strippers.

"I just happened to be looking in the paper one day and I saw an ad for, I think, the Raging Stallions, a visiting group of Australian striptease artists, and mentioned to Anthony that it could be a good basis for a play.

"It wasn't a project that required a lot of research, although I did go to a nightclub to watch a male striptease to see what was going down - which was a bit of an eye-opener."

The script came together over a few months and premiered at the Mercury Theatre in November 1987, and the rest was you-know-what.

"A few friends said it was a terrific commercial idea, but the actors were convinced it was going to bomb. I didn't really know what to expect. The way it took off was a surprise to both of us."

Sinclair has no idea how many productions there have been since - he hazards the undoubtedly accurate guess of "a lot" - but it has had a continuous life in South America and Europe. This year there's a seventh national tour of Britain, it's doing well in Moscow and is going on to Poland.

Devenie has never played Ladies Night before - "unlike Robbie I was never cursed in the beefcake mould" - but directed the original script in a Whangarei production last Christmas.

"The concept is the classic play," Devenie says, sitting down for coffee with Magasiva. "But this is a completely new script. It's tighter, sharper and more witty. I've watched the guys in rehearsal and I crease with laughter because Stephen has turned the intentions inside out, so the intentions of the characters are very clear but they're not aware of it, but we know what's going on with the dynamics."

The reason for the original success is simple enough. "Sex sells, basically," Devenie says. "Four spunky guys taking their clothes off is going to pack the place out. But the point is you have this wonderful script before that, and so it's a melding of form. The guys taking their clothes off is not the most important thing. It's getting to the strip.

"It's very much a play of the 80s rather than from the 80s, which is interesting. The original play wasn't so aware of its time. But because Stephen is now able to look back, all of that New Right economics stuff is not obvious but it's threaded through the play in a beautifully satirical way. There is a lot of good satire in it."

Devenie is Bernie, a bar owner from Te Atatu who helps the boys to get the stripping idea out of the backyard. Sinclair has beefed up the relationship between Bernie and ex-stripper Glenda (Wiseman), so there is history, though it's not explicit.

Magasiva's character Wesley has also changed from the original version, though Magasiva, who got his kit off in TV3's The Strip, says there is not much new for him.

"I've played many characters similar to Wesley. I seem to be typecast as these sorts of characters, the guy who's the womaniser, the cool one out of the blokes who gets the woman but is still loyal to his family. I hate to say it, and that's how it is, but it keeps me working, being typecast as a kind of beefcake. I hate it, I hate that word."

So how does Mr Beefcake feel about the stripping?

"I'm fine. Though the heart's going 100 miles an hour ... "

"But also," adds Devenie, puckishly, "probably 1.4 million of the population have seen your tired old body in The Strip."

Well, yes, but what does Magasiva's mum think?

"My mother has seen me have sex on film, she's so used to it."

Performance

* What: Ladies Night

* Where & when: Sky City Theatre, previews Thursday, Friday; opens Saturday, until December 13