By Michele Hewitson
"Other men do it easier. I don't know, I can't help it - I talk too much," says Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
Jonathan Hardy, who is to play Willy in the Auckland Theatre Company production, offers these lines by way of apology. He does, you can't help but concede, after an hour in his company, talk rather a lot.
But no apology is required: an hour of Hardy's company consists of a rapid-fire ramble through the history of New Zealand theatre, through the psyche of the country, through the history of Hardy himself.
And it is a ramble by turns thoughtful, provocative and endlessly entertaining - the only distraction being Hardy's marvelously expressive eyebrows which function, caterpillar-like, as large, furry punctuation marks.
Hardy was once described as the New Zealander as familiar in Australia as Bob Hawke and Dame Edna but as unknown in his own country. He couldn't live here, he says with the slight regret of the interested observer. (Now 59, Hardy spent 10 years as a young actor in England; apart from a sojourn as artistic director at the now-deceased Mercury Theatre in the early 80s he has been based in Australia.)
New Zealand, he says, has frightened him since he escaped from the Wellington garden where he was brought up by his Catholic mother, "a war widow on a pension. I was never allowed outside the back gate in case a Baptist got me. My mother would hang out the window and accuse people of being Masons and concealing their apron in their case.
"So it was pretty mad. But the frightening thing was - and you see this a lot here - this isolation, especially in the male population which, in trying to protect their families from an unknown intruder, you put a fence around them and finally that's a prison. Parental reality reigns and quite often that reality is mad - quite seriously insane."
Dark truths, he says, reinforced by a landscape which informs New Zealand's arts. Drive down a road in New Zealand, he says, and you're likely to see clouds covering mountain tops: "so there's not only a sense of danger and darkness on one level, on the other level you can't see where the sky begins. So, poetically, there is a great lamenting quality about New Zealand which is reflected in the work of people like Janet Frame."
It's that quality which means our poets and painters and writers are close to us, says Hardy. And why the "economic rationalist argument is stupid. There are things that are beyond that sort of valuation. If you don't have language from poets and writers and theatre, how do you know the object you describe?"
Hardy finds New Zealand a particularly frightening place to find himself in at the end of the millennium: "the booty-smacking attitudes coming from the parliamentarians," the "religious maniacs who take over power ... and decide to dumb down the place because they don't understand the arts."
It is, though, the ideal place to be taking on Willy Loman who represents the hollowness of the American - and the personal - dream.
And thank god, says Hardy, that he's not playing Willy in Australia.
Australian directors are, he says, "cursed with concept. You can end up playing Hamlet attached to a meat hook." Still, Willy Loman is "harder than playing Hamlet. Hamlet is rhythmical and in verse, Willy Loman is static, raging - in a very personal way. There's nothing abstracted about the way he does it. You've got lift the actor up to be real in Shakespeare, but Willy is real and yet in a fantastic miasma of delusion."
It's a delusion he likens to his own delusion of euphoria after his heart transplant in 1988. The man who had been given a second chance decided to become a fresh-water crayfish farmer and tomato grower. But he'd send the crayfish to the fish market then return hours later intent on buying them back so that he might release them. He'd plant obviously sick tomato plants and watch them keel over. He couldn't help himself - everything deserved a chance to live.
He knows all too well, he says, the fear Willy Loman faces. Knows too well the "madnesses that come out of a dying person. You're stressed beyond belief, frightened all the time and Loman is like that."
He's also like all of us, says Hardy, "and in the great tradition of Greek tragedy the story comes toward you, it is inevitable - and we're relieved he's our scapegoat."
All of everything we know is put on him, says Hardy. And that makes him harder - and more frightening - than Hamlet to play.
What: Death of a Salesman
Where: Maidment Theatre
When: Thursday until October 16
Home truths worry the returning son
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