Hardy annual elusive

By PAUL PANCKHURST

He was the moon in Moulin Rouge. He is a one-time Academy Award nominee (for co-writing the screenplay of Breaker Morant), a heart-transplant survivor, a character in the sci-fi television series Farscape, a former director of the long-deceased Mercury Theatre and, now, a regular on stage with the Auckland Theatre Company.

Wellington-born Jonathan Hardy, 61, a short man with a big belly and famously beetled brows, is visiting from Australia to star as Man in the company's production of Edward Albee's The Play about the Baby.

Scene one: A Thursday morning finds Hardy, Elizabeth Hawthorne (Woman), and the two younger actors, Michael Hallows (Boy) and Jenny Freed (Girl) rehearsing an early part of act two.

The small audience includes director Simon Prast, who adds comments and criticism, or encourages the actors with "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes."

Act one had begun with Girl hugely pregnant, and then, offstage, the sounds of a birth. Later, the young couple encounter Man and Woman. Eventually, Man and Woman announce they've come to take the baby.

A hysterical Girl asks, "Where's the baby? What have you done with the baby?"

"What baby?" says Hardy.

"Yes. What baby?" repeats Hawthorne.



Scene two: Five days later. Journalist, photographer, publicist and leading man are gathered around a table in the theatre company's offices.

The journalist's plan is to ask Hardy about his first reactions to Albee's script, his understanding of his role as Man, and the detail of the process of transforming words on paper to public entertainment on a stage.

However, journalist and actor do not share a common understanding of the interview process.

For Hardy, each question is a springboard, with answers that bounce across ideas, memories, eras and continents, from Galileo to Helen Clark's trousers, from a hatred of the tenured academics he's worked alongside in Australia ("I never met such low-life in my life") to the thoughts of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (The Function of the Orgasm, The Mass Psychology of Fascism).

One thread, not always easily visible, is that he wants to draw a distinction between believing in "constructs" and facing up to reality.

That's what he sees the play as about. It seems the baby here may be only a "construct" or a "convention".

Hardy quotes snatches of poetry, speaks of the cathartic effect of bullfighting, talks of the New Zealand landscape ("those strange mountains that you never see the top of"), expounds on the role of the artist, and brings up the history of this country's conscientious objectors.

His audience of three is often bamboozled as trains of thought career past at high speed.

The journalist does what journalists do, which is to keep going back to the original questions.

Asked about the staging, Hardy says it's a "fairly spectacular set".

"There's an enormous slope on it. I have to do my Julie Andrews and rush up and down hills. No mean feat, if you've got arteriosclerosis."

He cracks a joke about "no feet at all", saying he cannot feel anything in his feet after extended periods onstage.

"Really?" "Yes, but they may not exist, it may be only a convention."

He also talks of spending the previous weekend in hospital in Australia, saying he is on immuno-suppressant drugs, and vulnerable to every passing infection.

Scene three: The photographer has snapped away during the interview, but she needs more. The party of four goes upstairs to the rehearsal room.

The actor hams it up in front of a big poster for the show. He hits himself on the side, saying something about redistributing the fluids in his body.

He mugs it up, looking like a loon. He takes his glasses off. He sticks the arm of his glasses into his ear. Up his nose. (Just a little way.) Puts them on upside-down. Lifts his red T-shirt to flash the big white belly.

The show never stops.

* The Play About The Baby, Herald Theatre, March 14 - April 20.