Up close and personal

Warwick Broadhead has been performing and directing theatre for more than 30 years but his best act now is at home - your home. GREG DIXON reports.

There are things to be enjoyed in the comfort of your own home. Brazen wines, broad-waisted meals and the delights of a well-stuffed chair would make my list. And perhaps, with these three in place, a little drama courtesy of the box might do for afters.

But theatre, live and uncut drama played out before you, next to the bookcase and in front of a television? Well, no, that's one that had never occurred to me - but then I had not met Warwick Broadhead.

The Aucklander, with some 30 years' experience as a theatre director and performer, offers such a home comfort with his newly minted adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant.

For as little as $400, Broadhead will turn any room you care to choose into a mini theatre for an hour and a bit to play out this timeless tale of generosity and overcoming selfishness for you and your closest friends.

This is theatre up close and personal.

"It's very intimate," says the 58-year-old. "I'm right there and they see me breathing and sweating. They see anything that goes wrong, they see everything that goes right. They can see the pores of my skin ... "

Using an LCD television, DVD player, an amplifier and speakers, Broadhead plays both narrator and selfish giant, interacting with other characters on screen.

His pocket operetta has a music score courtesy of Don McGlashan and Jonathan Besser, while Helen Medlyn, Michael Hurst, Jennifer Ward-Lealand, Georgia Duder and Fritha Walker provide guest voice appearances.

But in the end it's just Broadhead in a small room with his audience. "It requires a lot of focus for me to do the story without being distracted by the audience. I'm aware of them, I need to be able to pick on how to be with them. It's challenging.

"But it's also a great privilege to be asked into people's homes to perform. I love that aspect, because I'm made very welcome. And I think for them it's a special occasion. It's a lovely thing. It's a very sort of warming thing to do."

The Selfish Giant, which will feature in living rooms throughout the country through this year, is Broadhead's second salon sortie. Since 1995 he has performed (and continues to perform) his first home theatre adaptation, of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, in nearly 400 rooms, from a stately home in London's Kensington to a tiny student bedroom.

A friend had suggested doing The Snark years before, but it hadn't really worked for Broadhead as a community show or even in front of a few people. "I couldn't get the idea of it," he says.

Like many an idea, the solution to the problem and the inspiration for the front room drama floated out of the ether and into his consciousness in the vastness of India. Broadhead was travelling through the subcontinent in 1993 and, while in Rajasthan, came across artists painting miniature pictures with the single hair of a camel.

"If you look at them through a magnifying glass they're absolutely beautiful. I thought, right, I'll do The Snark in miniature.

"Then, in another part of India - I was there six months - it was the festival of snakes. And the people brought snake charmers into their homes for some kind of purification.

"The doors were all open because it was so hot, and we were walking the streets and saw the families and the snake charmers in their homes. And one time I walked past and saw the snake charmer getting paid. So I thought 'in miniature, in the homes' and came home and started working on The Snark adaptation immediately."

Another friend suggested doing the same with The Selfish Giant, and another line was added to his CV, a catalogue full enough to burst an eye.

Broadhead's career stretches from a couple of dozen works conceived and directed by himself to dozens more working for others, including the Limbs dance group in the late 70s/early 80s, The Hungry City at the now-defunct Watershed in Auckland, to The Tempest at Downstage in Wellington. His career has been full of weird and wonderful ideas - and some of them have hung around for years.

"One idea is that I wanted to do a show with just a newspaper, no lighting, it's just what I do with the newspaper. This has been on my books, as it were, for 20 years. I first tried the idea out 15 years ago on the Paris Metro. I sat in the subway with a newspaper. I folded it and I sang my way through this story. It was very curious, but fantastic.

"People would come and leave and come back. But I only made two francs - nobody gave me money. But I'm not a busker really anyway. I enjoy a captive audience - I hate it when they can walk away."

The paper idea is still a work in progress, he adds. Last year he worked with Theatre Initiatives (a theatre collective) and took it further, and it may yet see the light of day in New Zealand.

But where, you have to ask, do such ideas come from? Certainly not from the drink, Broadhead says he's near teetotal.

"My standard answer to that is the Woman's Weekly. It's true," he says, giggling. "I do get ideas from everywhere - from seeing other performances, from going down the street, my family, all the places I've been, from overhearing a conversation. I've done a whole song around 'oh yes, yes, yes' which, during my bus-catching days, I'd hear women saying that all the time."

As well as the theatrical results of his many whimsical inspirations, Broadhead's CV also lists a series of curious consultancy services including "high priest of rituals", "show-off" and "computer neophyte" (he has his own website).

But ask Broadhead what he really prefers to call himself and he says "artist". The word art forms part of the word "heart," he says. Apparently this is significant.

When I put it to him that "eat" makes up part of the word "theatre", his hoots rattle the lights.

"Yes, eat ... of course ... making a living."

But it is thespian that suits Broadhead best. In the flesh, he is demonstrative and engaging, a performer constantly seeking to please his audience. He also has a rich sense of humour.

You'd have to, to marry your house, a villa in Grey Lynn. This he did about a year ago.

"I'd been out of my house for eight years travelling around overseas. When I got back I just loved it. I loved walking into it - I was filled with love for it. It's a very beautiful house. A friend said why don't you marry it. She kept saying it over the next few months and eventually I married my house. She was the celebrant. It was a wonderful ceremony.

"There were special words written and objections raised, things like I was never there. And when I was finally married, Louise the celebrant said you may now kiss the room."

Which naturally, he did. If all the world's a stage then so, of course, is your home.