This company wants you in the director's chair

Ten weeks' pay and a rare opportunity to direct a $100,000 production is up for grabs for three people, writes MICHELE HEWITSON.

The picture of Raymond Hawthorne (above) could be used as a poster for the Auckland Theatre Company's recruitment drive.

The company wants you - at least, it wants three of you - to become trainee directors in its new ATC Second Unit scheme.

Hawthorne is the perfect advertisement for the career: you can tell by looking at this picture of him in action that being a director is a fun sort of job.

But if you're considering such a career, you already know that. What you'll also know, says Oliver Driver, former Shortland Streeter and now associate director and Second Unit coordinator at the ATC, is that you have endless drive, commitment and passion for a job which is never going to make you a millionaire.

Under the Second Unit initiative three trainee directors will be taken on for 10 weeks during which they'll work on two ATC productions. They'll be in on the production from the beginning. From there on, says Driver, it will be up to them how actively they decide to participate. The successful applicants will be paid for the 10 weeks, enough to pay for food and rent, and more than the dole, Driver says.

But he doesn't want people turning up straight from drama school saying: "Now I'd like you to pay me to learn how to be a director." He wants those who are already directing - whether it's in amateur dramatics, small theatres like the Silo, television or film.

In return, he says, "We'll give you the opportunity to work with professionals, with an option to have a future with the company as well."

It's a chance to move up from, say, directing a play at the Silo with a cast of two and a budget of $600 to a six-hander with a budget of around $100,000. Which is, says Driver, "an impossible step to take on your own."

ATC is also calling for scripts - and promises they won't sit on the floor in somebody's office as they have been known to do in the past. They will be professionally assessed and "if we like it, we'll get it read by a professional cast and directed by a director. If we really like it, we'll spend money workshopping it, developing it. And then we'll put it on."

A long-time dream of ATC producer Simon Prast, the Second Unit scheme has been financed by Creative New Zealand, which has given the company $60,000 a year for three years to develop its educational programme. Patrons of the ATC, a group "who care about the arts and have enough money to do something about it," have contributed a further $60,000.

It's the right time for a mentor programme, says Driver, who believes that there's room in New Zealand for three newly trained directors a year.

"I think that we're desperate for them," Driver says. "If we don't start finding them soon there's not going to be any left. We have some fantastic directors in this country, and they're doing amazing work, but a lot of them are quite old. It's hard for new directors to be given a chance."

* Send applications to Oliver Driver at: Auckland Theatre Company, PO Box 6513, Wellesley St, or email him: oliver@auckland-theatre.co.nz