Audience flips over characters

From left, Edward Peni, Tahi Mapp-Borren, Daniel Mainwaring and Madeleine Hyland play several parts. Picture / Rachael Dyson-Mcgregor

Madeleine Hyland doesn't maintain eye contact when she speaks. Rather, the 23-year-old actor looks into the distance - not dreamily or distractedly, but as if she can see the ideas she is avidly explaining and wants to pull them closer.

Many of these ideas relate to staging Shakespeare's Cymbeline, a romance believed to have been written in 1609, with similar themes, settings and characters to his earlier and better known works.

Hyland is passionate about Cymbeline, so much so that she formed the Peripeteia Players to stage it at Auckland's Dog's Bollix pub in April.

Keen to maintain the energy and the buzz Cymbeline generated, Hyland approached Silo Theatre's artistic director Shane Bosher about staging it there. He agreed immediately.

"I saw Milo's Wake at the Dog's Bollix and I got shivers up my spine," she says. "I was drawn to the space because it is so evocative of the sort of places Shakespeare worked in. It allowed us to break down barriers around accessing new audiences.

"It is fantastic to have the opportunity to do the play again, to keep it in repertory and create a sense of a company which works that way. It also means we have the chance to access another crowd, to experiment and to keep learning about the play."

Veteran actor Stuart Devenie, father of one of Hyland's acting buddies, Laurel, directs the production which features Daniel Mainwaring, Edward Peni, Matu Ngaropo, Nisha Madhan, Phil Brooks, Rachael Dyson-McGregor, Sarah Gallagher, Tahi Mapp-Borren and Trygve Wakenshaw.

"It's pretty stripped back in terms of sets and costumes," says Hyland. "We want the audience to make the connections and decisions about what's going on."

That begins even before the play starts when the audience gets to decide, on the flip of a coin, which actors will play which characters. Each cast member learns several different parts, allowing them to change characters.

Devenie played the Roman God Jupiter in the earlier production but there will be surprise "guest Jupiters" this time round. Hyland rejects the suggestion of gimmickry.

"Anything can be open to those types of accusations but that's certainly not the intention behind it. We are not doing it to target audiences.

"We want to explore and to discover what the words are doing, why the characters are saying what they are saying and what the effect is on people. It's about stimulating the imagination and, in the spirit of investigation, asking why something works in one setting but, perhaps, not in another."

Hyland chose Cymbeline because it fascinates her. It's partly because of the ending where the redeemed heroine, Imogen, dodges death after a tumultuous journey to reunite with her true love Posthumous, and tries to bring a divided world back from the brink of tragedy.

"I love the sense of moving forward at the end of Cymbeline but it's not in keeping with the rest of the play," says Hyland.

"It's almost as if Shakespeare gave into the audience demand for a happy ending but premised it with the message that happy endings take patience, time, commitment and hard work."

It is a fair summation given that Shakespeare wrote Cymbeline after Elizabeth I's death when England was adjusting to the rule of Scottish monarch James, had endured another plague epidemic and faced Guy Fawkes' gunpowder plot to blow up Parliament.

Hyland also likes that Cymbeline incorporates aspects of other Shakespearean plays - the ill-fated love story is akin to Romeo and Juliet and Imogen's male disguise is reminiscent of Twelfth Night's Viola - but it has its own twists and turns.

More than that, though, it seems to match Hyland's optimistic outlook, which goes some way to explaining where she and her friends get their energy and enthusiasm from.

"Perhaps every generation feels this way but, despite everything in this world, I really feel we are on the brink of being able to discard and do away with a lot of things that constrict us and find a better way of living, one that's more about community."

* Cymbeline is at the Silo Theatre, Oct 5-21