Rollicking stones

By LINDA HERRICK arts editor

Glam American starlet Caroline Giovanni is taking a break in her film-set trailer on location in rural Ireland. She breathes deeply and stretches out in a graceful, fluid yoga movement ... no, that really is going too far. Alan Brough, who plays the lissom Caroline in Marie Jones' comedy, Stones In His Pockets, collapses in a heap on the floor as his try for "the cobra" turns into "the corpse".

It doesn't help that his Stones co-star John Leigh is wobbling helplessly with the giggles - as is everyone else in the Auckland Theatre Company rehearsal room. Brough may claim, "I don't have a problem playing a woman," but at this stage, Caroline does need more work. Not to mention a shave ...

But Caroline is just one of Stones' assembly of odd characters. Brough and Leigh play 15 people in total, in the satire of the effect on a tiny, dirt-poor community in County Kerry when an American film crew swoops in to film a ridiculous period blockbuster. Unemployed locals get to make £40 a day as extras; the Americans treat the Irish as quaint, disposable loons; and two dreamers - Jake and Charlie - decide to pitch their own movie idea to the big producer. And then there's the issue of life going on after the Americans and their money leave town.

A sharp take on Hollywood's arrogant assumption of global imperialism - which New Zealand is now starting to attract: wait till Tom Cruise arrives in Taranaki - Stones last year won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Comedy, and went on from its Edinburgh Fringe Festival debut to the West End and beyond.

Although widely acclaimed, Jones' construction of 15 characters - male, female, old, young, Oirish, Scottish, cockney and American - presents a fiendish challenge for its cast of two.

"Last week when we did the first run I fully admit I f***ing freaked out," says Brough. "It was like being trapped in something really evil. It appeared entertaining initially but then I started to feel, 'Oh my God, I can't do this.' But now we just flip back and forth between the characters - it's quite extraordinary."

Longtime buddies, Leigh and Brough have the knack of ending each others' sentences, much like their central characters, Jake and Charlie. So when one suggests, "Someone who wrote something like this ... ", the other ends with " ... hates actors".

"I reckon Marie Jones was going out with an actor and that actor was involved in devising this, and it was much simpler," surmises Brough. "And then they broke up and she did this."

The trick to Stones, he adds, "is that it's quite childlike in a way.

"Basically we look like Jake and Charlie all the way through but the switch to the other people is done through the voice and mannerisms. Normally, when you act you invest everything into one character but here it's a bit like two people telling their mates a story in the pub and pretending to be the other characters."

"I think that's why it's so popular," Leigh chips in. "You think it's this guy just telling you a story ... "

" ... and there is very much the aspect of pretend about this," says Brough.

"Ha ha, no one's really going to think Alan is a woman," Leigh says with a snigger - although it's worth noting his character Jake is seduced by Brough's Caroline. "We have got beards. There's only so much you can do to suspend disbelief. But Caroline has an aura of femininity ... she's a young Faye Dunaway."

Brough coyly flicks away an imaginary curl of hair and flutters his eyelashes. "I suppose there is a megalomaniacal aspect to my personality which I've been able to integrate into this character who controls everybody by simply doing this."

As rehearsals proceed, and Caroline strives to segue more effortlessly from yoga to the seduction of Jake - because she wants Irish dialogue lessons - director Oliver Driver exhorts Brough to "make her less like a porn star" as she coos into Leigh's ear. Leigh, to his credit, keeps a straight face - most of the time.

A familiar face in Auckland's standup scene in the early 1990s, Brough moved to Melbourne seven years ago. For the first couple of years, he was performing 250 shows a year "and got a little better at it", then film work started coming in: The Craic, with Jimeoin; Siam Sunset, with Danielle Cormack and Linus Roache; The Nugget, with Eric Banas, which is about to be released; and Bad Eggs, written and directed by former Te Kuiti-ite Tony Martin, who has worked on projects like The Castle.

"Don't forget working with John Clarke," prompts Leigh.

"Oh, yes. I wrote for the first series of The Games," says Brough of that not insignificant Australian TV comedy series.

"Opportunities you wouldn't have got here," says his mate, who played Lionel Skeggins on Shortland Street for three years. Leigh has recently wrapped work on a rather unusual opportunity himself: the role of Hama, the chief Doorward of Theoden in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which comes out later this year.

"In a lot of ways we see the play as quite similar to The Lord of the Rings when they came here and invaded places like Methven or Matamata," says Leigh. "It starts out with the locals being quite in awe and after a while they get sick of it. Their own way of life is destroyed but the money is good. That's one of the points of the play, it's another form of imperialism.

"We did the LOTR shoot all over the country, they moved this huge armada of 250-odd vehicles and then 500 horses would turn up. It was like being invaded except they didn't kill anyone. It was like, we'll churn your fields up, build a castle ... "

"And leave salt at the end so nothing can grow," says Brough, adding wistfully, "I would have given anything to be in The Lord of the Rings."

He sounds even more jealous when Leigh goes on to add that he also had a part in Ozzie, an American movie made here featuring a talking koala - and Joan Collins. That film has, so far, not been scheduled for release.

"Joan was lovely, really nice, a princess," Leigh says gamely. "Rachel Hunter is in it too."

An admission that gets a screech from Brough. "Oooh, I'm going to have to track Ozzie down!"

Now it's back to rehearsals and that awkward yoga position. Driver wants Caroline to look more "seductive", which produces some decidedly ungracious positioning of Brough's bottom - namely, waggling it at Leigh. But then Brough's feminine side takes over as he looks down at his shoes. "God, she's got such huge feet!" he squeals.

* Stones In His Pockets, Herald Theatre, from Thursday until September 28.