Britannia rules the Wellington festival boards

Some of the most acclaimed contemporary theatre in Britain will be seen in Wellington at the New Zealand Festival. STEPHEN DOWLING reports.

When a huge Hollywood movie hits a sleepy town in Ireland's County Kerry the locals don't know whether to reap the financial rewards or decry the intrusion. Sound familiar?

Much before the furore over The Lord of the Rings and big-budget film-making in NZ, Stones in his Pockets by Northern Ireland playwright Marie Jones struck a chord with London audiences.

Seen through the eyes of two prospective extras hoping for parts and easy money, this reflective comedy's 15 roles are played by only two actors. It created a fuss in 1999 at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, a traditionally Irish area in north-west London.

The story revolves around Charlie Conlon and Jake Quinn, aiming to make a quick buck from the visitors. Top stars are drinking in their local pub and the extras are getting £40 a day. But what's going to happen when the film crew leave town, and are Charlie and Jake going to be able to go back to their old lives when it's all over?

The two actors also flit from the pretentious Hollywood star of the film, Caroline Giovanni, through to a suspicious Scottish security guard and a nasty assistant director. It's sometimes an effort to remember who is telling the story, though by the end most critics seemed to have hit the rhythm of the play

Stones in his Pockets jumped from Kilburn to the West End two years ago, and the sparky comedy has picked up an Olivier Award, the prestigious London theatre gong, and had rave reviews from UK newspapers during its various West End runs.

It will seem all the more pertinent here after Wellington's recent past as the biggest film set in history.

The Brit theatre season also resurrects Rita, Sue and Bob Too, a 1982 play about two schoolgirls having an affair with a married man that became best known for the 1986 film directed by Alan Clarke.

This festival, it's appearing as part of a double-header with A State Affair from the Out Of Joint Theatre Company. The plays are both set in Bradford, 18 years apart.

Out of Joint's relationship with the plays is longstanding. Director Max Stafford-Clark helped 21-year-old Andrea Dunbar to pen the play in 1982, based on what she'd seen in deprived, inner-city Bradford.

Cynical Bob is happy to use two compliant schoolgirls, as well as mistreating his long-suffering wife. During the Thatcher social revolution he ends up as just one of many embittered, jobless men in northern industrial cities left withering on the vine.

The play was so strong that it prompted a critic from the Times to claim every member of the Conservative cabinet should be forced to watch it.

In 2000, after a national outcry that Britain's council estates were helping to create a new underclass, Stafford-Clark travelled to estates around Bradford and Leeds with the cast to see how much had changed 18 years on.

Much of the dialogue for A State Affair comes straight from the interviews. The play has seven characters, each with similar stories of abusive fathers, glue-sniffing, dead-end jobs for the lucky, and uncertain futures. It's a grim snapshot of an England that doesn't make its way to postcards and Cool Britannia exposes.

The last show is 3 Dark Tales by Theatre O, a madcap physical theatre piece set in an office. Theatre O comes from Britain but its actors, writers and musicians come from all over the world.

It was founded in 1997 by graduates from Paris' elite mime-and-clown school Ecole Jacques Lecoq and has built a reputation for combining the classic slapstick of silent cinema with traditional clown and physical routines.

Theatre O's 3 Dark Tales is about three office workers, Tibble, Amelia and Frank, each of whose home lives is falling apart.

Tibble tries to keep reality at bay by indulging in wild fantasies and hoping they will somehow come true. Amelia gets a phone call that suddenly turns her life upside down, while office manager Frank is spending every moment he can in the office because his home life is so dull. Gradually the three come together.

British critics have hailed its dense, twisted dialogue, sudden big dance numbers and chaotic atmosphere. It has had two runs at the Edinburgh Festival and a season at London's Barbican, and has also been put on in New York and Brazil. It shows that quite apart from the tourist-filling mainstream shows in the West End, the UK's long-standing name as a proving ground for ground-breaking theatre is still with us.

* Stones in his Pockets runs from February 22 to 27; Rita, Sue and Bob Too and A State Affair, March 6 to 10; 3 Dark Tales, March 12 to 17; all at the Paramount Theatre, Wellington.

www.nzfestival.telecom.co.nz