Elliott turns to directing

By LINDA HERRICK arts editor

Actor, TV star, documentary fronter, erstwhile theatre critic adviser and now theatre director: is there no end to Peter Elliott's ... "megalomania"? He volunteers the word himself with a laugh, but he's deadly serious about reshaping his career after 20 years of acting. After working with drama students and script read-throughs at Auckland's Unitec over the past couple of years, Elliott is making his directorial debut with second-year students and an extremely challenging work: playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker's tragedy The Love of the Nightingale.

Wertenbaker, resident writer at London's Royal Court Theatre in the mid-80s, has a formidable reputation but her works are rarely seen in this country. Elliott can recall a double bill of her Our Country's Good and The Recruiting Officer at the Mercury in the late 80s but that's about it.

The Love of the Nightingale, based on Sophocles' lost tragedy Tereus, "is about what happens when enforced silence is pushed on to people", he explains. "Various people fall in love with the wrong people at the wrong time, and death and unpleasantness ensues. Wertenbaker has framed it in great tragedy but she has written it in a very modern style with everyday, colloquial language."

Now he has a taste for it, Elliott hopes to direct "more and more". "What took me so bloody long?" he ponders. "Sometimes stupid people like me take a long time to figure things out."

The Love of the Nightingale runs at Unitec Theatre until September 7.