Bitter experience arms duo

Emmett Skilton (left) and Phil Peleton bring insight from their Hollywood experiences to Stones in His Pockets.

Actors draw on their own humiliating tales for a play about filming in a rural Irish town.

Having been in Los Angeles auditioning for television pilots and films, The Almighty Johnsons star Emmett Skilton does an entertaining impression of an American casting director going through the motions of screen-testing actors without even bothering to look at them.

Skilton's co-star in the play Stones In His Pockets, Phil Peleton, has an equally humiliating story.

"I was on the set of a major feature film right at the front of one of the crowd scenes and was told to lead a charge and 'go bigger, bigger, bigger' until I was going too big and the director announced, in front of everyone, that he wanted me moved right to the back so no one could see me."

They bring insight like this to Stones In His Pockets, a tragi-comedy about a small rural town in County Kerry, Ireland, that is taken over by a Hollywood film crew. The locals are all keen to impress as extras but the thrill soon fades.

Skilton's character, Jake Quinn, is more sceptical than his neighbours. He has recently returned from New York and has a much clearer idea of how the world works. Skilton reckons Jake represents healthy cynicism while Peleton says his character, the outrageously optimistic Charlie Conlon, symbolises hope.

"What's in the forefront of the play are ideas about people's dreams and ambitions and how it's important to have faith in yourself and pursue your goals, but you need to know there are other ways of achieving them," says director Andrew Foster.

The contrariness of using theatre - and just two actors to play 15 characters - to tell a story about the way Hollywood shapes cultural perceptions isn't lost on Skilton, Peleton or Foster.

The fictional film crew want to portray a stereotypical Ireland of bucolic beauty where the inhabitants are charmingly rustic. They're not interested in anything that deviates from this notion.

Yet Foster says the script is clever enough to ensure all the characters are complex enough to emphasise that what is captured on camera is unlikely to be the full story.

First performed in 1996, Stones In His Pockets was written by Belfast-based playwright Marie Jones. On its first tour of Ireland, it played one night to just five people. That didn't deter its makers from taking it to the Edinburgh Festival three years later. A more extensive Irish tour followed before it was taken to a suburban London theatre, then transferred to the West End for three years before a Broadway season in New York.

"It was first performed 18 years ago," says Foster, "and, since then, we've all got a whole lot more savvy about the way we watch film and television so it's a different play because of the experience an even more knowledgeable audience will bring to it."

Theatre preview
What: Stones In His Pockets
Where and when: The PumpHouse, Takapuna, October 16-25.