Skin and Bone

The classic New Zealand play 'Foreskin's Lament' is coming to the small screen, and two of its front-row actors talk to GREG DIXON.

The list was a long one, all right. One rugby player had a wrenched neck, his middle back collapsed, there was lower back trouble and a pulled gluteus muscle.

The other did both hamstrings, one Achilles tendon and suffered knee and shoulder injuries.

No, we're not talking the All Blacks. We're talking actors Charles Mesure and Antony Starr, the stars of a new tele-feature of an old play, Foreskin's Lament.

Renamed Skin and Bone for its small screen premiere this weekend, and adapted by Greg McGee from his classic rugby play, it goes where the stage could never take this story, on to the footy paddock.

Which meant our luvvies - big, fit lads though they are - were required to be what they are not: tough-as rugby players.

"[Expletive] hell, the shoot was hard," says Mesure, who is the film's stop-at-nothing hardnut, Clean. "All the rugby sequences were shot at night. We were out there until 2 in the morning. You'd shoot a sequence and there'd be 20 minutes of down-time while they re-angled the camera. You get physically warmed up, take the hit - and they were full on - then you'd cool down waiting, then you'd do it again. We did that all night. It was tailor-made for injuries. We got hammered."

Mesure, who won best supporting actor at this year's film and television awards for his work on Street Legal, had at least played rugby. Starr, an alumni of Mercy Peak, had not. Though it didn't seem to make a difference. The real-life rugby players who feature, including Bull Allen, were not immune, either. But the result was worth it, the pair reckon.

"It's very Raging Bull. It's very Ridley Scott," Mesure says. "When I saw the opening sequence, all the steam, slow-motion, bodies colliding, I went 'holy [expletive], this is Gladiator'."

It's also impeccably timed. With the world cup just a week old, Skin and Bone offers scriptwriter McGee's thoughts on rugby now rather than the late 70s, when he first wrote the play.

"These are not the kinds of things that you get to say every day," Mesure says. "It's a very important time for rugby, for New Zealand, and I think this film expresses a lot of that."

The play has a history of good timing. Foreskin's Lament is important not only because of what it said about rugby and about New Zealand when it was written, but because it was first performed in 1980, the year before the country tore itself in half over rugby.

The play's discussion of moral choice had a profound resonance far beyond the stage as this country's government, rugby union and people had to make a decision about the 1981 Springbok tour.

Twenty years on, the play remains relevant and continues to be revived. The most recent Auckland season was in 1999.

But Skin and Bone is a more modern beast, with a strange new character, a colossus called professional rugby.

The pivotal clash between Clean, Seymour and their team captain and coach, Ken (Robbie Magasiva) and Tupper (Roy Billing), has a professional rugby contract, rather than personal and team glory, as its foundation.

The loss of the amateur values also provides an over-arching theme.

Mesure: "In the play Clean does what he does because he wanted to be captain - which may have been a tenuous motivation. In the film it's a very concrete thing, something people can identify with and think 'well, I don't blame him for doing what he's doing'."

Clean remains perhaps the most memorable figure from the stage play - and not because he gets the best lines. He must rate, bar Jake Heke, as the meanest mother in New Zealand drama.

"He is, very much so," Mesure says.

"But hopefully in the film you can see more of why he does what he does. I love Clean, eh. He totally believes in what he's doing. He loves his wife and kids so much he will do anything to give them a life he thinks they deserve. He's not motivated by resentments or hate, he's motivated by love - but he's hopelessly misguided."

Foreskin's Lament, famously, predictably, ends with Foreskin lamenting the state of the world and rejecting rugby.

Skin and Bone does not. Indeed it comes to a different resolution about the game at its centre, Mesure says.

"The film has a very ambivalent attitude to rugby. It shows it being beautiful. It shows it being violent. You see the whole thing."

But certainly the film ends with an element of mourning, a sense of loss, grief and horror.


Return of the dinosaur

Roy Billing has a great mug for a footy coach - the balding pate, the jowls and the no-nonsense stare.

And the actor adores playing one, or rather one in particular, Tupper, the die-hard, small-town rugby coach in Foreskin's Lament.

Billing, a New Zealander who lives in Sydney, was the coach in the original production of the play in 1980 and plays him for the fifth time in Skin and Bone.

"I do love him. He's so typical of a lot of men of his era, especially older men in sport. He's a bit of a dinosaur, he goes right back to the days when rugby was an amateur game. These guys think, whatever their sport is, that it's the solution to all the problems of young men," he laughs.

"There's so many of them around. You look at coaches of rugby or league and you go 'my God, there's a Tupper'."

Billing based the character on his father, who was obsessed with the volunteer fire brigade, and says he's now rather proprietorial about Tupper.

"I remember the first time I played him at Theatre Corporate in 1980 - the first production - I was in my 30s. I had to grey my hair, make myself look a bit older. Now I don't have to. It's strange to have aged into it."

In Skin and Bone, the character remains essentially the same, though he's not quite the kick-'em-in-the-head, win-at-any-costs coach he once was.

"Greg's stripped the bones out of the play and set it against the backdrop of Super 12 rugby. I think it has a lot more impact because the stakes are much higher."

Billing, who has featured in more than a dozen film and TV productions here and in Australia, including Came A Hot Friday and The Dish, says he likes the film more than the play because it seems much more real.

"I guess that's what film does. I think because it's been updated and set against the background of professional rugby, it's very real.

"We did some filming down in Patea. I looked at the old freezing works there and thought, 'wow, 2000 people used to work there and then almost overnight it shut down and that's the end of the town'.

"That visual image, which you can't, of course, do on the stage, has much more impact. The other thing about the film is that you actually get to see some of the rugby - and you get an idea of how hard the game really is."

* Skin and Bone screens on One, 8.30pm Sunday.