KEY POINTS:
PERFORMANCE
What: The Cut
Where and when: Silo Theatre, to November 3
Frank Whitten needs a cigarette so Robyn Malcolm and I join him and step out of the rehearsal room into a park at the foot of Mt Eden. It is a picture-postcard day but we barely notice the weather. Whitten and Malcolm have other concerns, like how to capture the rhythm and pathos of the language in Mark Ravenhill's theatrical parable The Cut.
Whitten and Malcolm are used to acting together. They have worked on the television drama Outrageous Fortune for more than three years.
Whitten plays the family patriarch, Grandpa Ted, whose memory comes and goes as often as his grandchildren's love interests. Malcolm is Ted's bolshie daughter-in-law, Cheryl West.
But The Cut poses a different challenge. They play a husband and wife in a marriage that is rapidly imploding in a world doing much the same thing.
Described in the marketing material as "a fine example of Britain's in-yer-face-theatre", The Cut recasts the adage that each person is political and dissects the often brutal world of the modern corporation.
Whitten says it is a wakeup call that demands that audiences think about the world around them and the impact of modern life on individuals, families and society as a whole.
He plays Paul, a sombre-suited civil servant who follows departmental dictates and, unknown to his increasingly dysfunctional family, is the practitioner of a particularly sadistic office ritual known only as The Cut. Malcolm is his wife, Susan, who battles with domestic neurosis.
Also in the cast are Mia Black, Jarod Rawiri and David van Horn, and Jonathon Hendry directs.
It is, Whitten and Malcolm say, a long way from the comfortable atmosphere of the Wests' living room.
"It is diametrically opposed to Outrageous Fortune," Malcolm says. "It couldn't be more different in terms of the subject, the language and its density, the temperature of the piece. I guess the only thing they have in common is the use of expletives - but even then, there are words in this we could never say on television."
She says their long experience as actors means they do not have to dwell on re-casting their working relationship.
"If he raised one paternalistic finger in my direction, I think I'd smack him," Malcolm says. "We are old-enough actors and do what it is that actors do. I think, as an actor, you find yourself in a strange kind of place if you do not have strong and instinctive boundaries around who you are and the characters you play.
"That explains why, for example, on the set of Outrageous, we can be joking in the dressing room one minute and then yelling at each other on set the next."
"It's meant at the time," says Whitten, "but only in that moment and as those characters."
That Whitten knows how to get a reaction from Malcolm is apparent from the story they recount about getting her to sign on for The Cut.
"He rang and said to me, 'She's an absolute pig of a woman so you'd be perfect for the role'," says Malcolm.
Whitten says he wanted to do the piece because "I like work and I like to work. I had a play lined up to do in Australia but Outrageous went on for longer so I had to pass. This came up and here I am."
Malcolm says she took a little persuading but was swayed by the intelligence of the writing and the play's use of metaphor and symbolism.
"It's good to stretch the muscles," she says. "When you work on television you work in a specific way and it's easy to forget there is a big wide world out there of other stuff. You put your head on the block a lot more with theatre, particularly a play like this where there is not a sugar pill at the end."
