Take a chance on us

A decade ago the Auckland Theatre Company rose from the ashes of the Mercury. Now ATC has three plays running at once, writes DITA DE BONI.

Age of Aquarius, or eerie ebb and dramatic flow of life? It seems inconceivable that Kevin Smith is dead.

Also strange: that Auckland theatre and a large group of print theatre critics have fallen out with each other.

And that the vagina, the subject of one of the most successful plays staged in Auckland, is still considered, in the year 2002, to be so inflammatory, so vulgar a body part that hours and hours of uninformed talkback ranting can be set aside in its honour.

This triumvirate of extraordinary events, which all involve the Auckland Theatre Company to some degree, has unfolded in the lead-up to the company's 10th-anniversary year.

Their newsworthiness is perhaps a signal that "Auckland theatre" is no longer an oxymoron, that the art form is once again very much a part of the cityscape, having returned as a key entertainment option - and a media feeding ground - for Aucklanders. Witness the half million dollars and 17,800-strong audience for the company's production of Hair, staged last year, the record takings of $30,000 for one day of the Vagina Monologues, now in its second extended season and that three ATC plays - Take a Chance on Me, The Vagina Monologues and The Play About the Baby are running simultaneously in the city.

ATC founder and producer Simon Prast, still reeling from Smith's death and Leighton Smith's reactionary ramblings about Monologues (despite the fact he had not read or seen the work), is keen for the hard-fought, hard-played decade to be marked. And so, a few drinks will be had when exhausted cast and crew finish all five sessions of ATC shows today, after the final curtain.

Prast was busy putting his makeup on at the Mercury Theatre that fateful night in 1992 when hired goons came in and told all the actors to "get out" - the theatre was in receivership. Appearing simultaneously in two plays that night including one prophetically named Glorious Ruins, he remembers feeling, as he stood on the street in his makeup, a "sense of injustice that 25 years' work was allowed to disappear overnight.

"Many people said it was proof positive that Auckland was a cultural desert. But it struck me there was a prime opportunity to build a company again. I knew we had an audience. There was a space for mainstream, established theatre and subscribers to the Mercury who would, and in fact did, come to the ATC subscriber list. In terms of Auckland theatre overall, it was necessary to have a theatre company."

"As I've often said," he offers wryly, "you cannot have a fringe without a mat."

And you cannot have Auckland without theatre, chimes in veteran actor Stuart Devenie, shocking everyone including himself by appearing as a gold-G-string-wearing bicycle courier in Roger Hall's Take a Chance on Me.

"It's an important thing that the [Auckland] City Council realises that not everyone sells yachts. There is so much more in the way of culture that we need to develop, and that people want to see."

Devenie, who, as a doctor in the play The Cripple of Inishmaan, realised after "carrying out a perfectly thorough heart examination on Elizabeth McRae" that his stethoscope was not connected to either of his ears, says over the past 10 years, the hardest thing actors of his age have had to come to terms with - besides medical props - is the business side of the profession. Unlike the Mercury, where actors were hired on retainers to act in all productions, the Auckland Theatre Company runs everything on contracts and each play is a separate entity hiring different combinations of actors and crew. A permanent home is being scouted for but venues are varied at present. Indeed, Prast and Devenie treat PAYE as a "badge of honour", a sign of the increasing sophistication of their business. Devenie says the years from 1986 to 1996 were "terrible" for theatre across the country, as seven professional theatre companies were whittled back to one and, owing to a marked loss of resources, "solo shows were honed into an internationally competitive art form".

But theatre attendance has revived, which Devenie partly ascribes to the Government's - and specifically Helen Clark's - interest in the arts. A record 10 plays staged this year by the ATC provide steady income, affording the company the luxury of being able to develop "2econd Unit", the fringey young offspring which aims to hook in 16- to 35-year-olds and teach them to understand, enjoy and create theatre.

Not only amateurs benefit. Even a seasoned professional such as Hall is grateful he is able to ply his trade in his home city.

His work is perfectly suited to the audience ATC attempts to reach, the archetype of which has been personified as "Cynthia" - the professional woman in her 40s. "The ATC audience is really my demographic ... I am a chronicler of the times, and I represent the middle-aged, middle-class, theatre-going [person] and the stories that affect those people are the ones that I write and reach them with."

Prast says his audience is looking for a mix of local contemporary (provided most ably by Hall), international contemporary (he admits he has to check his tendency to overload the bill with American works) and the classics (this year, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.)

With all the choice Prast has, and the power he wields over so many theatre actors and associates in the city, has he become a bit of a king-pin figure? Outraged theatre critics might say yes, after his attempt to ban them from reviewing opening-night performances last year, trying in vain to keep them out until performances settled down. While now relenting on that idea, Prast has continued to wage war on a number of critics, including the Listener's Natasha Hay. Despite last week's Listener carrying a space where its review of the Vagina Monologues should have run, the fiery Prast insists the debate between himself and critics (one tussle was with former Herald arts editor Gilbert Wong) is an "old chestnut". He says he "sleeps easy at night" and stresses that there is "no power, and no glory" in his job.

Instead, he says, his sense of satisfaction comes from reaching people whom he might not normally - such as the young man in a McDonald's drive-through. "I thought he was going to say, 'You're that Gloss actor!' but he actually remembered me from [my direction of] Death of a Salesman - which high school students loved - when I had stood up and spoken a few words afterwards. And a girl who told me I had helped her pass Bursary English after she'd seen the same play."

With wistful dramatism he adds: "That's the power, the glory."