The Daylight Atheist at the Maidment

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The phone rings. It is unseen, hidden somewhere in the rubble of Danny Moffat's life.

His lament: "Did anyone ring for me? Did the Pope ring for me? Frank Sinatra? Chairman Mao?"

Danny Moffat is a drunk adrift in a room stuffed to the ceiling with junk.

His family argue down the hall about whose turn it is to perform the unwelcome duty of delivering his tea tray.

He withers with his sarcasm. He calls his wife Dingbat and his eldest son Egghead. They have no other names, except that he occasionally calls Dingbat, "Jesus, you're ugly".

And Danny Moffat is a raconteur with a stammer, and the most loyal of mates. He sits at the bedside of his dying friend, Jack, and entertains him with a story about Egghead's lack of skill on the soccer field. It is a lament, a side-splitting one, of another sort.

Danny Moffat doesn't drink at home as a rule. He drinks at every pub and club in town. But a man has to draw the line somewhere.

Danny Moffat is based on Tom Scott's father, a man he knew almost nothing about.

Not his date of birth, not how many brothers and sisters he had, not why he had so early drawn a line between himself and his family and dared them to cross it.

Out of not knowing all that, Scott, one of New Zealand's funniest men, has created another of New Zealand's funniest, and cruellest, men. And the best piece of New Zealand theatre in a very long time.

Stuart Devenie plays this complex character with rare skill. He is not a big man but he invests in Danny Moffat a sort of hollow largeness, constructed of bravado, hot air and beer. It is a brilliant portrayal.

There are other characters, unseen - they live within Danny Moffat, or on the periphery of his existence. They irritate him with their neediness - he is more than happy to buy Egghead a school uniform, as long as it is not compulsory - yet it is really Moffat who needs his family.

Without them, he has no butt for his jokes; without them, in fact, he has no material for his jokes.

But all of this - just over two hours of sneers made into torrents of soliloquy - is a big ask even of someone as accomplished an actor as Devenie, and it shows.

Its length, for a one-man show, just verges on indulgence. It needs a judicious prune.

So, we could forgive Devenie a slip of the tongue which had him call Egghead Dingbat at the turning point of the play when Egghead finally stands up for himself, and his mother.

Freudian, perhaps, but a distraction.

As is John Verryt's set, a towering pile of the debris of a life where all the money has been spent down the boozer.

It makes a cluttered stage and poses a major navigation problem for any actor. But when the actor is playing a drunk it becomes even more cumbersome to clamber around.

The set revolves slowly. This is clever: the world revolves around Danny Moffat. But once noticed, it's hard to stop noticing it.

With Devenie in the role, the props and tricks of staging are simply superfluous. Watch him extinguish the malicious twinkle in Danny Moffat's eyes with an utter deadness. You're inside the soul of the complicated man who is an atheist in daylight, but who, when the shadows begin to creep, thinks he might well owe an apology to God.

Moffat is already well on his way to becoming a classic character of the New Zealand stage.

It is no small irony that this man, who could not embrace his family, and who would not be embraced by them, will be taken to the hearts of audiences.