For want of a West End

Drama circles need to nurture young performers. That's where the "Ambassadors" help, says FRANCIS TILL.

There's no West End in this city, laments Auckland Theatre Company's 2nd Unit head Oliver Driver - but his company aims to try to remedy that.

Along the way, the 2nd Unit also has plans to inject some cachet into drama for the young, helped by a new education policy that makes the primary arts part of the core school curriculum.

The lack of a West End - a place for plays to mature in front of audiences before they hit the big venues - is a problem that has dogged New Zealand theatre for years, says Driver. It's a problem that has generated considerable controversy, as well, especially among critics.

Last year, the ATC stopped sending out reviewer tickets for opening night performances, saying it was unfair to criticise a play before it had a couple of performances to settle itself. Critics hit the roof, by and large, saying any play being presented to a paying audience should be ready enough for a professional critique.

Driver thinks "regional theatre" is part of the solution for this problem, and the 2nd Unit is taking on a commitment to help to build satellite theatre companies, helping them to make the precarious jump to professional standards of performance.

"Everyone talks about Wellington, but that's not the right model for Auckland. We need something like London, like San Francisco - where plays mature in full view on the way up.

"It's not a question of competition with the ATC," says Driver, recognising that success would open more venues for what has been a limited audience base. "The most important thing is to build a critical mass of really professional theatre. Once that happens, we all benefit."

But the 2nd Unit, known best till now for its experimental productions, has another, perhaps bigger goal this year: to make theatre appeal to audiences from 16 to 35 - to make it cool - and entice a new demographic into the audience pool.

Changes to school curricula help - students are now required to take course work in dance, drama, visual arts and music alongside maths and English - but Driver says New Zealand has a sports culture and getting young people into the theatre takes a lot of doing.

Enter the Ambassadors, a selection of the "most passionate" year-12 and year-13 drama students in colleges around Auckland, one for each school, who are given access to the work of theatre at all levels, and opportunities to see and discuss plays in production.

Driver hopes some will become professionally committed to theatre, while others become enthusiastic catalysts at their schools.

There are 50 of them this year, up from 15 last year, and in a group they make a compelling visual statement. These are the actors of tomorrow, perhaps, but they are also the nucleus of the next audience generation.

In addition to these objectives, the 2nd Unit is building its other operations with a view to spinning them off into separate companies, Driver says. "The literary unit alone will be huge, and soon."

The unit is designed to discover and develop playwrights and plays in a complex, multi-faceted programme. Scripts are read and evaluated, after which some are taken on for further development through workshops and readings.

A few, like The Bellbird by Stephen Sinclair and The Daylight Atheist by Tom Scott, might make it to the main stage (for example, Bellbird and Atheist are being performed in this year's ATC season).

2nd Unit also operates a training programme for production crew, acting courses that accept candidates by audition, and skill-based workshops for students and teachers at the college level.

There's even a scholarship programme to help budding young theatre critics learn their craft. And, yes, it produces plays, three this year, in two performance sets, beginning with two plays on alternating days between July 19 and August 10 at the Maidment: Angelo's Song by Denis Edwards and Small God by Jacques Strauss.

These plays are part of 2nd Unit's "Final Draft" programme, in which a writer is given four weeks with a director and a full cast to produce a "finished" script. The scripts are then previewed in performance.

"Play Two" is also at the Maidment, from October 3-26. About this one, the company says only: "6 writers, 12 actors, 15 stories, 50 characters, $10,000 lights and sound, 1 night in the city."

And one ambitious programme.