Home on the stage

The itinerant life suits respected theatre director Colin McColl. He talks to TIM WATKIN about life as a talent for hire.

A pair of black, shiny shoes are tucked tidily under a decades-old pew. The shoeless man perches on the edge of the pew, elbows leaning on a small desk as his eyes roam the room. He is dressed in black and dark blue, in contrast to the blanched white, well-lit room.

A pen is in his hand and the hand moves frequently between a folder, where he scribbles notes, and his mouth, where it hovers as he intently watches the actors before him.

Suddenly, a missed cue prompts a laugh and a rethink. He leaps to his stockinged feet and moves the actors to different positions, wonders out loud about a lighting change and encourages the young leads.

This is Colin McColl in his element, bringing another play to life as he has been doing for three decades. The location changes frequently for the director who works freelance these days, but any stage is home.

He's in Auckland to work on a production of The Elephant Man with third-year students at Unitec's school of performing and screen arts. But not for long.

"I must have been freelancing for seven years now and I'm always running from job to job. One has to be flexible and peripatetic, to go where the work is.

"I came from opening Cat on a Hot Tin Roof [at Downstage] straight into rehearsals for this with no break. This opens on Saturday and by Monday I'll be rehearsing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern back in Wellington."

Yes, McColl's been busy since he left Downstage in 1992. He says now he was worried "it was getting a bit like the public service."

"I'd been at Downstage for about eight years and it started to feel like there needed to be new blood there. Also, I was getting lots of offers to work overseas. It was not viable to still be artistic director of Downstage while taking that time off."

In the years since he's had a varied career, directing the likes of Sweeney Todd for the Queensland Theatre Company, La Boheme for the then-National Opera in Wellington, and even moving into television with Shortland Street and The Tribe.

"It's a matter of new challenges," he says of television. "And the money's not to be sneezed at either.

"The good thing about fast turn-around television in New Zealand is that it's very, very efficient and it's taught me not to procrastinate so much and to be succinct."

McColl's to go behind a camera again soon, directing a "quirky" new teen drama called Being Eve, about a 14-year-old philosopher. "It's kind of like Sophie's World meets Adrian Mole."

So why is one of the country's pre-eminent directors - fresh from rapturous reviews for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Downstage - working with students? Nothing more than the happy coincidence of a request from the course lecturers and a gap in his schedule.

"I don't do it very often, but whenever I do it's very refreshing. They're full of energy and they've acquired so many skills that they're dying to put into practice.

"When I see the level of accomplishment with the young actors now and think of what we were like when we were at drama school ... They are much more knowing about the business."

They are still superstitious enough to be conscious of the ghosts hanging round the Unitec theatre, though. In a rather eerie meeting of art and history, this story of social stigma and disability will be acted in the former Carrington mental hospital and the students say there are ghosts on site to this day. Even the institution's Victorian buildings are perfect props. The Auckland Lunatic Asylum was built in 1867, five years after John Merrick - the Elephant Man - was born in Leicestershire, England.

The play is being performed in an old dining room still painted hospital white, with heavy doors and pews brought from the old chapel to seat the audience.

"It's quite nice to do it in a place like this rather than a normal black theatre," says McColl, curled up in an old armchair during a break from rehearsals.

He chats enthusiastically about New Zealand theatre being in "vibrant" health at the moment, with some "fabulous talent" at work.

Shortly before going out on his own in 1992, however, McColl made this warning in the Listener: "New Zealand must link to the world theatre community ... The one thing that will kill New Zealand theatre is parochialism."

Eight years on, he says the parochialism has largely dissolved.

"It's broken down a bit now, thanks to the foresight of people like Simon [Prast] at the Auckland Theatre Company. Even though he bitches on about Wellington, he does invite lots of Wellington theatre people here. And the big power bases are gone. The Mercury's gone, Downstage doesn't have the same hold over Wellington theatre that it used to have. And there's a lot more touring.

"Also, actors have to move around. When I came to Auckland it used to be a rarity, but now actors fly up and down. They might be doing a show in Wellington and fly up to Auckland to do some television thing. Ten years ago it wasn't like that."

His hopes for better connections with the wider world of theatre have not come to pass, however. A "feast" of theatre comes here via the International Arts Festival in Wellington but, with exceptions such as some Taki Rua productions, New Zealand plays are not being exported.

Hard as it is to raise money and convince Australians of the quality of anything from these shores, McColl wants our theatre community to make a concentrated effort to tap into the 6 million people just hours away in Sydney and Melbourne.

"We've got to try to get our work over there because whenever I've taken work to Australia, people have been quite blown away by it."

* The Elephant Man by Bernard Pomerance, directed by Colin McColl, Unitec School of Performing and Screen Arts, until May 27.