Madeleine Sami, chameleon at the crossroads

Madeleine Sami is a natural talent forged by Auckland's cultural diversity. GILBERT WONG talks to one of New Zealand's finest young actors.

Madeline Sami turned 21 this year. It's a birthday that can be burdened with significance, but on the day Sami found herself in High Wycombe, a nondescript urban hamlet outside London nominated the most boring place on Earth by unpatriotic Brits.

She and fellow actor Ian Hughes were performing the play Bare by Toa Fraser. So there they were - two New Zealand actors and a British stage technician.

Sami: "We had a curry and a beer ... then I went to sleep. Goodnight nurse."

That was her 21st. But Sami shrugs, "I've never been home, home is away now. I've been on tour for so long that it was so appropriate."

She is home today in her mother's house in the Auckland suburb of Onehunga. Sami grew up in this compact, weatherboard house, with its peeling paint and unruly garden conquered by weeds. Inside, the detritus and treasures that loving families create layer every surface - from collections of family photographs to knick-knacks, everything has a memory.

Over the back fence is her old school, Onehunga High, where she was head girl. If any place can, this place explains how Sami got to be Sami.

Madeleine Sami the actor may just be the finest young talent this country has produced. The play that made her and playwright Toa Fraser's names, Bare, scooped the 1999 Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards, with Sami taking the best actress award.

Fraser's next play No. 2, which has been touring the country, took home a coveted Perrier award from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year. In the Observer Susannah Clapp, a critic not known for effusiveness, called Sami a "marvel". Nick Thorpe in the Independent gave similar raves: "It is the mark of a truly remarkable performer that an hour and a half in a small bare room with her can leave you with lush filmic images and a sense of magic ... "

What they would not have said is that the plays Bare and No. 2 have practically consumed Sami's young life for the past four years as she matured from a fresh 17-year-old to a 21-year-old who can seem, understandably, a little more world-weary than her years. What's kept her going has been the international arts festival circuit where the plays have proved surefire hits. There's been the praise and inevitable pride at taking a New Zealand story - not even that, she corrects, a Mt Roskill story - to the world, but the trade-off is the toll of boredom the road takes.

"On the road is a constant state for me. It's just mad. Sometimes you have these amazing moments and then it's very boring, a real slog and not romantic at all. It's like Groundhog Day, or a road movie which instead of finishing in 90 minutes has been my life for the last four years."

The hard thing is the loneliness of a solo performer. At the end of the night there's another empty hotel room, in two more days another city. Sami estimates that she and Hughes drove 5600km around Britain on their tour of Bare this year. The overriding image she retains of that time was the endless stretches of anonymous motorway, relieved by another collection of chain stores. "We saw a lot of M-everything."

By the time she reaches Auckland, Sami will have performed No. 2 more than 125 times. It has become, like Jacob Rajan's Krishnan's Dairy, a signpost of how successful independent and local theatre can be. But the price of success is that the actors can seem trapped, running on the treadmill of repeat performance to make a living.

But she will not deny the importance to her of the No. 2 national tour. It's the first time that Sami has been able to take the show to new local audiences. Her pick to date was the Embassy in Invercargill. Normally a rock venue, Sami had to compete with large scrawled graffiti in front of the stage that read, "Tadpole Rules." The audiences of southerners were the most warm and responsive she has experienced.

Reviewers talk of Sami's ability on stage to shapeshift and morph like a chameleon. That's a demand of the plays. In No. 2, which comes to Auckland next week, she plays nine characters from an aged Fijian New Zealander matriarch to a lovesick footy player.

Off the stage her personality tends to flicker a little as well. Her skill at mimicry is a defence mechanism, averting the serious. In conversation she switches from a burly Fijian to a Swedish new-ager to British pub lizard in a way that defies description.

Put that down to a childhood in a big, not very well-off, Onehunga family. Mother Catherine Southee, a Pakeha with Irish ancestry, and father Naren Sami, a Fijian-Indian who settled in New Zealand, raised a family of four children. Sami comes second, with an older brother Daniel, 25, and two younger sisters Anji, 18, and Priya, 13. Large extended families stretch from both parents, who separated when Sami was 12.

Sami makes light of what must have been an experiment in culture clash. "My mother's Irish Catholic, my father's Hindu. I guess they didn't reconcile their religions."

With her children either grown up or at high school, Catherine Southee has started training to become a teacher. Naren Sami, who remains in touch with the family, was a coolroom engineer who now works as a mechanic.

It's obvious to Sami that her diverse family, and the way Onehunga is a crossroads and cross-section of Auckland, created the actor in her.

"I think it's responsible for what's happened to me up to now. Because you see them all around here, my catalogue of characters is there because of my family, my father's family and the community. They're all out there. I love it.

"The thing about Onehunga is that it is a mix of all kinds of groups, maybe it's how Ponsonby used to be. It's a meeting place, it's the place before the bridge that isn't Mangere or Epsom, and the community reflects that. Growing up here, I have had a good look at a cross-section of Aucklanders."

Though wary of pop psychology, Sami offers up that in a big family, being able to make people laugh was one way of getting attention.

"My mum says I was more inclined to pop out with something funny. It is said that I used to run into walls to amuse people. I don't think I was precocious, I was just a crazy child.

"It's so funny when my family come to see the show. Everyone else is saying what amazing acting, changing characters and so on and they're saying, 'You get paid for that? We've seen all that before'."

As far as theatre goes, Sami's career is like Jonah Lomu's, but without the millions. She started as a professional actor straight from school with no formal training and almost immediately began picking up awards.

She is pragmatic about the baggage actors carry.

To a question about whether she has missed anything by not attending drama school, she says: "I get a bit scared about the thought of spending three years in an institution just for acting. I can fathom doing that for other disciplines but what makes a good actor seems such a subjective thing and people are so different."

She's happy to do courses on voice technique and breathing, but is leery about exercising grey matter on what comes naturally.

"It's all so wishy-washy, that stuff. I don't intellectualise it a lot. If I identify with anyone it's David Mamet. I just think you have to say the lines, but that's me. There are actors who get excited about method, but I don't buy into it.

"I pretty much say the lines, but beyond that statement, it's saying the words and letting the words do the work and letting the emotion come from those words. But hey, whatever method works for you, that's your method."

Throughout the interview Sami clowns about, joking with the photographer.

Ask if this young actor has missed out on the experiences a 21-year-old could expect and she sobers up for a moment.

"It's a bit like my growing-up got condensed. In a way I haven't left home. I've learnt and grown heaps but in other ways haven't. I just have to accept that's how my life is and not agonise about it too much."

As an actor she knows she can only mature. Her world view doesn't extend beyond the next year, but somewhere beneath the hilarity, there's serious self-recognition.

"I'm not the spunkiest, skinniest chick in the world and haven't got work because of my looks but have had to become an actor. That's what will get me through life. I hope to continue to create characters that are interesting and complex and that people believe ... "

* No. 2 by Toa Fraser, starring Madeleine Sami, plays at the Maidment Theatre October 2-6.