Tandi Wright - Leaving behind telly soap to grapple with Shakespeare

By SUSAN BUDD

Looking like a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Olive Oyl, Tandi Wright has wowed audiences and critics in the role of Helena in the touring production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Slim and leggy, with a mop of platinum curls, she wrestles her swains to the floor. Shakespeare's words trip off her tongue, sounding more like Ponsonby cafe-speak than 16th-century blank verse.

Just 30, she has returned to the stage after four years on Shortland Street as nurse Caroline Buxton, a woman unsure of her sexuality. Now she is rediscovering the thrill and risk of theatre.

"Working with such a high calibre of people, watching them every day pushing the limits, made me realise that I must do that too," she says. "I wondered if I could do it and to my great delight I think I can.

"Part of it is me saying I bloody well can do this, so I try 110 per cent, and part of it is probably bluff."

After some very complex text work with the director Simon Bennett, Wright observes that Helena leapt out as insecure, neurotic, self-absorbed and interested in nothing but her love for Demetrius - a guy she describes as a total drip. Love is blind, she laughs.

Wright also feared it might be possible to mess up badly. But no, the audiences roar as she wrestles her hapless lover. "Audiences always enjoy watching women beat up men," she says.

The touring New Zealand Actors Company production is proving enormously successful. "We have had quite a few letters saying, 'I brought my husband along kicking and screaming and he spent the entire next evening regaling our friends.' Many have never seen Shakespeare before and loved it," she says. "School kids love all the sexy, rude bits and Puck, because he is so wild. They shout and whistle and make yowling cat noises when Helena and Hermia fight."

At forums after each school's performance, Wright has been impressed at the calibre of questions. One was, "Do you have to have a passion to be an actor?"

She agrees that you do, because it is not easy financially or emotionally. "You have to realise that people are not going to like you all the time, that you have to have faith in your own judgment," she says.

"Acting challenges me the way nothing else does. This profession puts you on the line. Truth is the key to acting. Audiences will suss you if you are not being truthful."

After four years on television, Wright is accustomed to recognition, but has managed an initial return to anonymity.

"I had a wonderful day when I first had this fabulous hair job and went into Newmarket with my glasses on and it was like freedom but it has worn off, unfortunately."

Her mother, Dinah Priestley, was a core cast member of Close To Home, before achieving success as a maker of batiks. She is now in the field of oral history. Her father, Vernon, was a successful journalist who now runs a safari business in Zambia. Her sister Justine is a film editor in London and edited the Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September, about the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

But she is unconcerned: "If I get used to this feeling, it could be a very positive thing because, though the uncertainty is destabilising, it is also energising. There will be no sitting on my laurels."

If none of her irons heats in the fire she plans to travel to India. "I love travelling and it is good for you to realise your insignificance in the scheme of things," she says. "When I come back I am struck by the intensity of light and the slightly over-regulated society where I can't make a move without someone knowing."