Enter the director, stage centre

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Let's not forget that Colin McColl was an actor before he was the director who became the man now running the Auckland Theatre Company.

In his youth (I have put that in just to annoy him, for reasons which will become clear) he did rep theatre in London.

So he knows how to do mock horror convincingly. He is doing it now.

He has decided - at least he has decided to pretend - that I am trying to paint him as "this conservative person". He has already told me that his first season for the ATC is "sedate ... not too wild".

Now he is trying to tell me that "I actually really like wild theatre, you know."

Right oh. McColl is the guy who loves Ibsen. Ibsen is "hilariously funny and sexy". He is the new artistic director who would like to have a whole year of things like Caligula.

"But I can't do that. People like something that's more tasteful."

His first line-up goes like this: The Talented Mr Ripley by Phyllis Nagy, Goldie by Peter Hawes, Spreading Out by Roger Hall, The Bach by Stephen Sinclair, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Grease and, oh yes, Caligula by Albert Camus.

It is fitting that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf makes the programme. It was the first piece of professional theatre McColl saw. His publican aunty took him along to it at the Opera House in Wellington.

"What a wonderful introduction to theatre," he says now.

His father, a milkman, didn't think quite so much of the theatre. When McColl chucked in his safe copywriting job at the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, his father said, "Oh Jesus."

McColl senior might well have blamed the publican aunty. McColl blames Naenae. A place, he says, which has spawned many an actor. "We were all so desperate to get out of the bloody place."

All this took place back in the stone ages. "Stone ages" is his term. He has been directing now for "30 years this year. God."

He is 54. And he thinks (or pretends to think) that I am asking him his age and about those long ago times to paint my predetermined portrait of that conservative person.

He claims to be nervous about the launch of his first season - it took place at the Auckland Art Gallery on Thursday night. He does not hugely enjoy the high-profile part of the job. He says he can't remember names or what the owners of the names do.

Of course, he's been doing this stuff for years. And even if he does hate it, he could easily act his way through it.

He says he is very shy - and he probably is - but he is also quietly charismatic and has a wonderfully contagious braying laugh which would no doubt endear him even to those whose names he had forgotten.

Perhaps not to the Mayor, though.

Which brings us to what McColl obviously regards as a slightly tedious comparison with the last guy to hold this job, Simon Prast.

Prast, who set up ATC, was very high profile. Now director of the Auckland Festival, he was voted the 2003 Auckland Man of the Year, first equal with Mayor John Banks, by Metro magazine readers.

McColl, you might think, has rather big shoes to fill. Big, hairy, flamboyant shoes. Prast liked to wear his hairy shoes to opening nights.

BUT McColl has those 30 years, and three artistic directorships, behind him. He is widely regarded as easily one of our best directors. He is wearing, I am pleased to report, rather sensible boots. And he is not, he says, grinning, "interested in power. I don't think I have anything to prove."

He is "more interested in making a contribution to the company working together", and says diplomatically that he "sensed the company was getting a bit split up". He likens ATC to Italy up to the late 19th century "when it was all city states. We need a federation".

Under Prast, and then associate director Oliver Driver, we lived in interesting times. Especially if, like me, we happened to be critics. Being critical ensured that Driver, and sometimes Prast, would fire off emails to editors.

The Listener's response to the ATC's withdrawal of any complimentary tickets to its reviewer was to publish a blank space where a review of The Vagina Monologues should have appeared. All terribly silly.

McColl has a different style. He used to say to Prast, "For God's sake, take the criticism. Take the critics out to lunch."

We'll see. He likes to play. He is very good fun and then has the nerve to say - after having said at the end of the interview, "I'm just being flip" - that this has been a "deeply silly interview but I hope you got a few things".

This, I say, "is a very serious interview. Do you have any complaints?"

"Wait until I see it in print. You'll be getting that bloody dirty email."

I leave McColl's bare office and stick my head around the door. I am looking for Driver. "He's not here," says McColl.

Good, so I can say: "Now what are you going to do about that naughty Oliver?"

Driver, who stood in as artistic director while McColl took an overseas sabbatical, "has finished his term ... He's working for us on a freelance basis now."

NOW I am not a vindictive person, but I do have to own to saying: "So, you've given him the chop?"

"No, I haven't," says McColl, doing a very good performance of a very stern director of a Federation. "I'm telling you he's completed his contract ... I said to him, I just need some space to put my stamp on things."

McColl's stamp. He has yet to work out exactly what this will mean other than what he has already begun: giving staff the chance "to air grievances. We can get it all out on the table".

He is not going to go any further than that.

He is, according to me, quite bossy. He was probably, again according to me, born that way. "Oh yeah," he says, "I was. I'm probably more of a director in my life outside here. All my friends keep saying 'Oh, stop directing us'."

He must, he cheerfully agrees, be hell in a kitchen.

He is magical in a rehearsal room. He has long been able to conjure that necessary magic from actors.

Creating a successful season requires another sort of alchemy. An artistic director's choice of plays will always, he agrees, say something about his psyche.

And "I suppose various things have shaped my life in the last few years to make me look at things a little more deeply."

In 2002 he and his wife, poet and playwright Vivienne Plumb, lost their only child, actor Willy Plumb, to leukaemia. In the space of a year, McColl's father and brother also died.

"So, like a lot of people I suppose, I was the kind of person who loved that joke about the man who's getting the heart transplant. He's asked: 'Do you want the heart of an athlete or do you want the heart of a theatre director?' And he said, 'Oh, give me the heart of the theatre director. I want a heart that's never been used'."

He used to think "it was hysterically funny. Now it's not so funny."

You cannot help but think the ATC is in good hands - and heart.