Fresh theatre concepts from France

By BERNADETTE RAE

Thirty years in France have given ex-patriot New Zealand actor Heather Robb a distinct European flair.

She stepped off her long international flight, just 48 hours before her commedia dell'arte workshop at Unitec was due to start, unfazed, uncrumpled, wearing dramatic jewellery and spunky hair - and with a decidedly French, 14-year-old daughter at her side.

More than 20 actors, dancers and other theatre people enrolled for the workshop in commedia dell'arte led by Robb, who has performed and taught extensively through Europe and Australia - at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris, the French National Circus, a community-based theatre school in Normandy, and at Sydney's NIDA.

The 16th-century "comedy of artists" has a remarkably modern feel in the year 2000, Robb says, as it deals with the existential themes of greed, poverty, death, sex and survival as a giant tragi-comic farce.

"Everything is improvised and performances are often outside. And everything comes from the actor."

Robb also founded the first Playback Theatre group in France in 1988, and remained as its artistic director until 1996.

Playback is a medium she still loves - for its improvisation, its "provision of a terrain where all theatrical styles are possible" and for the close involvement of its audience.

"Every performance is a social event," she says.

Though strictly an Australian by birth, Robb grew up in Wellington, the niece of Sir Douglas Robb.

She attended Queen Margaret College with Jane Campion, where both were influenced by a remarkable drama teacher, Maria Dronke, who had fled her native Austria during the war.

"We knew she was extraordinary then," says Robb.

But it was not until years later, when her teacher died and Robb's mother sent on the obituary, that Robb discovered Dronke had been a member of the prestigious and innovative Max Reinhardt troupe, still seen as a seminal force in modern theatre in Europe.

"There were a lot of interesting European people in Wellington at that time," Robb remembers. "Mostly they were just trying to get on with life and integrate, but they were an important part of the climate then. I went to university with their children . "

Robb majored in English for her master's degree at Victoria - "there was no drama department in those days" - with French and German her other academic interests.

At 22 she left for France to take up a post as an "assistante anglaise" - teaching in French schools, and travelling and waitressing in her spare time.

It was during her time waiting on tables during the 70s that she developed an abiding interest in food.

Three years ago Robb and her husband purchased a 150-year-old farmhouse and land in the south-west of France, converting the property into a residential theatre training centre, called Les Combelles. Robb not only teaches and tends extensive permaculture vegetable gardens, but cooks for the students as well.

She feels she has now come full circle.

A barn on the property has been converted into a performance space and workshop facility and Les Combelles' kitchen can feed 16 comfortably at each meal.

The aim is to provide not only a venue for excellent teaching in the performing arts in an ecologically sound environment, but a retreat also, for the artistic soul.

An Australian creative writing group is already planning a visit and Robb hopes that her Australasian roots will foster more visits from the antipodes.

Robb spent several years studying at the Jacques Lecoq School, where the notion of actor as creator is stressed and where students are presented with "a fan of opportunities" in which to work - one of those opportunities being commedia dell'arte.

She returned to Australia in the late 70s but the Lecoq influence had not yet reached there and work was hard to find.

Robb created her own, primarily in a clown duo with another woman. And she did a lot of teaching. But by 1980 she was "fed up" and returned to Europe where she has lived since.

She returns to New Zealand and Australia every two or three years to visit family - an elderly mother in Wellington and brothers on either side of the Tasman.

Daughter Charlotte, who plans to be an actor like her parents, also maintains links with the New Zealand side of her family.

She is often a lone voice barracking for the All Blacks among her friends - and is the only girl to play in the local rugby club.