Behind-the-scenes with Kings of the Gym Stage Manager Oscar Mulheron.

Kings of the Gym Stage Manager Oscar Mulheron talks to drama on the waterfront about his accidental career, working with his uncle and the highs and lows of stage management.

The cast of Kings of the Gym. Photo by Stephen A'Court.

DOTW: How did you get into Stage Management and what was the appeal?

OM: I really fell into it by chance. One night my Uncle, director Danny Mulheron, came round to our house and when I asked him what he was working on he started talking about his exciting next project ­- a new play by Simon Cunliffe called The Truth Game. It was going to open at Circa Theatre in a few months. He talked about it with such passion and enthusiasm and I felt how really exciting it sounded. Well - one thing led to another and at the end of the evening he offered me a job as Stage Manager. As I was between jobs and at a bit of a loose end, it seemed very opportune, so I took the plunge and accepted. I had never stage managed before and I had no idea of what it involved but I felt that I really wanted to be part of this production.

DOTW: You are working at the moment on Kings of the Gym and once again your uncle is the director. How does that work out?

OM: It works really well - nearly all the time! Working in the theatre can be extremely demanding and stressful. It has been a good thing to know Danny first as family member. It meant that we had an ease together and an understanding from the beginning.

Danny is very passionate and totally focussed and we both had a total commitment to the production.  I learnt on the job very quickly what had to be done and of course I wanted to get it right because Danny put his trust in me. This is the 4^th production I have Stage Managed for him and I pretty well know the process now and can make sure things happen as well as he wants.

DOTW: What is your most favourite production you have worked on and why?

OM: It’s always the production I’m working on at the moment, which is Kings of the Gym - but for some reason I keep thinking of The Truth Game. I suppose because it was the  first production I  worked on. I was certainly thrown in the deep end and it was a very fast learning curb. During the rehearsal period I enjoyed watching for the first time the actors developing their roles and bringing it all together – seeing the process of devising and interpreting the script. Danny gets completely involved and is very open to suggestions and input which is one of his strengths. I loved that sometimes at the end of a rehearsal he would sit round with them and re-work a particular scene to find the substance and the story line.

During the run of the play it involved the management of a great number of props – all of which had to be placed in a very exact position. It made each performance very demanding. I definitely had to be on form every night.

Oscar Mulheron.

DOTW: There must be lots of funny moments bringing a production together. What is the funniest moment you have experienced?

OM: It was during the rehearsal period of CON. I was sent to collect a table

which was needed on the set and had been bought on TradeMe. I arrived at the house I was to get it from and discovered it was perched on the side of a hill and had to be reached by a cable car. It was fine going up but getting the table on to the cable car to come down was quite something else. With a lot of juggling it was finally achieved. It was blowing a gale and at one stage I thought it would take off and blow down the hill. Having achieved that part I arrived at the car only to discover that I didn’t have a hope of getting it to fit in. No matter how I  manipulated and pushed and pulled and tried every possible configuration I realised that it just wasn’t going to go in. I had a sudden inspiration to take off the table legs. Of course I had no tools to unscrew them. I then spotted a building site across the road. They were very willing to lend me a screw-driver and this did the trick. I was really pleased with myself with what seemed like a major achievement, and arrived back at Circa with the table ... only to be told that in the meantime they had a found another one that would work better so didn’t need it after all!

                 

DOTW: And the scariest?

OM: It was a sponsor’s night for The Truth Game and they had asked if they could have the earlier start time of 6.30 instead of 8pm. We had had discussed it and it was agreed by all that we would be happy to do that. However, somehow on the night – which was a few weeks later – at the half hour call only 3 of the five actors had arrived. It caused quite a bit of panic on my part as I tried desperately to contact them. One lived nearby so arrived pretty quickly but the other lived some way away and when I finally managed to get hold of her she not only had to get herself there but also had to find someone to mind her 2 year old daughter – in less than 25 minutes! To this day I don’t know how she arrived, got ready in costume, make up and on stage and on time. She opened the play with a rather long soliloquy and I was so relieved that she had made it.

DOTW: What would you say are the most important skills to have as a stage manager?

OM: Anticipation, consideration and of course organisation. And probably being able to multi-task and definitely being adaptable.

DOTW: What is it that you enjoy about being a Stage Manager?

OM: There are a lot of things but something I have really liked on both The Truth Game and Kings was working with our designer Dennis Hearfield and producer Howard Taylor. We had a lot of props to source. And then it was the satisfaction of seeing them all being used as part of the production in a very important way! We had great fun looking for and finding them all.

DOTW: Where to from here?

OM: I feel I need a break so I might take time out to do a trip to Thailand or somewhere in Asia. A friend of mine has just come back and it has tempted me to take a look. A while ago I went to the USA and enjoyed seeing a new and different country. I think now it would be a good time for me to take a look at Asia.

Kings of the Gym is on until 15 February. To book, call the Circa Box Office on 801-7992 or visit www.circa.co.nz. There will be a New Zealand Sign Language interpreted performance on Friday, 14 February. To book for that, please email circa@circa.co.nz.

Becoming a playwright

Kings of the Gym playwright Dave Armstrong tells drama on the waterfront about how he became a professional playwright in New Zealand.

(left to right) Kings of the Gym playwright Dave Armstrong and director Danny Mulheron.

As a professional playwright, one of the questions I’m most commonly asked, apart from the ubiquitous ‘where do you get your ideas from’ is how did I actually become a playwright? When I was a kid growing up in Wellington the 1960s, there were no professional playwrights in New Zealand. That would only change in the mid 1970s with Roger Hall’s brilliant and highly successful Glide Time.

However, there was local content. My father would take me to ribald Sunday night revues at Downstage, not to mention the even filthier ones up at the university. At these venues, relatively unknown young actors with names like Ross Jolly, Sue Wilson, Ginette McDonald and John Clarke would do their thing. Luckily, in those days it was cheaper to take a kid to the theatre than hire a babysitter, so my parents also took me to more respectable plays at places like Unity Theatre (now BATS), but the plays performed were rarely by New Zealanders.

The closest I got to seeing something like a New Zealand play was the brilliant Front Room Boys by Australian playwright Alex Buzo. That play really spoke to me because it was in a language and accent I could easily recognise. It was funny yet political as hell. It was such a thrill to actually meet him years later at a pub in Sydney next to a racetrack. In those early years I did see an excellent devised play about the history of New Zealand and a great production of the Band Rotunda by James K Baxter at Unity.   

Believe it or not, the Country Women’s Institute was also another formative influence. My grandmother, who lived in Dannevirke, was a member and she used to write skits for them. She also won an amateur playwriting competition they ran in the late 1930s. When Nana found out that I was interested in theatre, she would send down comedy sketches she had written in the mail and I would perform them with a bunch of friends at school assembly. Before long I was writing two-page epics about American slavery, the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, and a host of other topics, and performing them at school assembly.

The cast of Kings of the Gym. Photo by Stephen A'Court.

I also attended after-school drama classes which were great fun. Being the liberal 1970s, you didn’t get taught how to act or learn lines. Scripts were only for cissies. The emphasis was on creativity and improvisation. I don’t know if that is a good way to train an actor but it’s a brilliant way to teach playwriting.

I was lucky enough to learn from wonderful teachers like Margaret McCluskey, Steven Tozer, John Banas, Craig Ashley, Ewen Upston, Peter Corrigan and Ralph McAllister. Ralph was a family friend and asked me to do props for a play at Unity by a young New Zealand playwright called Robert Lord. It was fantastic, at such a young age, to learn first-hand how plays were constructed.

I believe you don’t learn to write plays in front of a computer but on the rehearsal floor. That’s where the really interesting stuff happens. From Robert Lord I also learned that plays didn’t need to have realistic sets and be like television – they could be abstract and surreal if need be.

By the time I attended secondary school, I had no intention of being a playwright, but I did enjoy writing articles for the school magazine and making up skits with my schoolmate Danny Mulheron. We had a sort of ‘hidden file’ of sketches we would have loved to have performed one day but were far too scared. In fact, after we had both left school and Danny was at Drama School, he performed some of them at a public showing.

They went down brilliantly with the audience, though one sketch, lampooning anti-Springbok tour protesters, offended some old communists and one Leftie left in tears. ‘I think that sketch was one of Dave’s’ said Danny loudly, avoiding the blame, and thus starting a brilliant thirty-year tradition of fearlessly quoting some of my most extreme utterances when I’m not there. It’s so nice to be informed about them by other people later on.

When Danny and I left our respective tertiary institutions we formed the Unn-Co-operative, and performed sketch shows around the country. It was huge fun. I quickly forget critical reaction to my work, but one of those early revue reviews made an indelible impression: "Writing Crucial Flaw in Satire".

Acushla-Tara Sutton and Richard Dey in Kings of the Gym. Photo by Stephen A'Court.

My sketch-writing career with Danny next got me into writing for television, mainly at the Gibson Group, with shows such as Public Eye, Away Laughing and Skitz. I greatly enjoyed working at Gibsons alongside a number of bright young actors and writers with names like Ken Duncum, Cal Wilson, Jo Randerson, Oscar Kightley, Raybon Kan, Jemaine Clement, and Dave Fane. I always did wonder what happened to these people.

But writing sketches is a young person’s game. I wanted to write a whole play. Doing an adaptation is a great way to learn the craft, and I chose Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. During my career I have been lucky enough to co-write with a number of excellent writers but Charles Dickens is definitely my favourite: he produces great stories, he has a remarkable ear for dialogue, and best of all, because he’s been dead for over a hundred years, he doesn’t ask for a share of the royalties.

The success of A Christmas Carol inspired me to write original work – some of it solo, some with co-writers such as Oscar Kightley and Danny Mulheron. Just the other day, someone asked me what I did for a living, so I told them. ‘So, even though you do lots of different things, your main activity is writing plays.’ I’d never actually thought about it before. ‘Yes,’ I replied after a moment, ‘I suppose it is.’

Kings of the Gym returns to Circa Theatre for Summer 2014, opening on 18 January. To book tickets, please call the Circa Box Office on 801-7992 or visit www.circa.co.nz. 

Ginette McDonald and the thrill of theatre

In this week's post, Kings of the Gym cast member Ginette McDonald talks about the siren call of theatre.

Acushla-Tara Sutton and Ginette McDonald in Kings of the Gym.

Q: What made you decide that 'life upon the wicked stage' was
for you?

A: The theatre has a siren call for some of us. Every year of my childhood we McDonalds went together as a happy group to the legendary  David Tinkham Christmas pantos at the Wellington Opera House where we always squashed into the same box; seven kids, two parents and an ex actress French grandmama. As we hovered, deliciously close, over the stage, David Tinkham, as the marvellous Dame, would trill ‘good evening McDonalds’. We felt a part of something very exciting and hugely entertaining. That excitement has never left me. The thrill of an orchestra warming up, a dancer dancing, an actor acting their socks off. Now that I’m aware of the realities of backstage life, performers sometimes performing with broken limbs or broken hearts, I’m even more thrilled by the theatre, its endless possibilities and the courage and discipline of its practitioners. As actress Kate Wilkin said to the wonderful Circa actor Bruce Phillips at his joyous 60^th birthday party, an event notable for it’s loving celebration of actors and acting; ‘Bruce, this occasion reminds us that ours is an honourable profession.’ The theatre is a big family, with its heart in the right place. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

Q: What was your first role?

A: My first role was as a very gymnastic Jack Frost in a St Mary’s Christmas production when I was six. It was a marvellous costume, all in one white bodysuit with lots of tinsel and glitter. Find the right costume and the character will fall into place. It certainly began a lifelong fondness for glitter. And acting, come to think of it. Last year , I played a small part as an ex nun protestor in Kings of the Gym director Danny Mulheron’s telefeature Rage. After we re-enacted the famous Molesworth Street march, we took a meal break in the St Mary’s school hall. As we dined at trestles set up on the stage, I smiled to myself at the irony of being back in the very place at which it all began...

Q: What is your favourite role? 

A: My favourite role is usually the one I’m doing now. Kings of the Gym has a great cast, dedicated to exploring new comedy possibilities with every show. I suspect my part as school principal Viv Cleaver was meant to be played as much more of a ballbreaker, but I’ve noticed that some people who hold important jobs are quite often way out of their depth. It’s fun to suggest Viv’s wheels falling off. Human frailty can be very amusing.

Q: What was your funniest moment on stage?

A: There’ve been innumerable funny moments on stage. Actors are trained, or rapidly learn to adjust to unusual circumstances. If an actor forgets their lines, cast members can jump in with a line like “ I suppose that you were just about to say etc etc...” Key props can sometimes be absent.  I’ve seen an actor reduced to having to mime changing an absent light fitting, until the real one suddenly descended from the skies and hit him on the head. On the opening night of A Passionate Woman at Circa, in which I played a disturbed woman going mad on a roof, Simon Vincent, playing my concerned son, was required to manoeuvre a cherry picker upwards to the very high roof set in order to coax me down. Unfamiliar with the controls he rose the machine too close, tearing half the set off in the process. Ken Blackburn, also on the roof playing my worried husband, had the presence of mind to shout out-in character- ‘mind out for me friggin’ roof!’ We then all lost it and shook with uncontrollable giggling-known as ‘corpsing ‘ in theatre parlance. Audiences generally love a bit of corpsing, but it’s highly unprofessional and not to be encouraged.

 Q: You are now in demand for after-dinner speaking – how did that come about?

A: At the age of 16, I played an angry little French speaking maid in a Downstage production of Private Lives, directed by the wonderful Scottish actor/director Tony Groser, father of Trade Minister Tim. Bruce Mason, a family friend, had suggested me for the role. At the same time, Bruce Mason, Roger Hall and Steve Whitehouse were performing a late night revue called Knickers. Bruce and Roger were champions of emerging Kiwi culture, and encouraged me to create a real New Zealand identity to appear in Knickers. Thus was born Lyn of Tawa. Over the years, Lyn has come and gone while I acted in the UK, became a TV drama producer and gave birth to my beautiful daughter, but seems to be fixed in the psyches of a certain generation of Kiwis. A sort of celebrity. I began to do after dinner speeches as Lyn, until one magical evening about 25 years ago when Federated Farmers asked me to speak at the Wellington Club. They wanted an hour and a half. They didn’t want to hear from Lyn. They wanted Ginette. My terror was palpable but I wrote some material and dived in. Since then I’ve been able to derive a reasonable income from corporate speaking,celebrity debates, pub gigs, either alone or with Gary McCormick, and MCing business conferences. I’ve learnt a whole new useful skill, while learning about the corporate culture. It’s fun and interesting ... they sometimes still call me Lyn though!

The cast of Kings of the Gym. All photos by Stephen A'Court.

To see Ginette as the indomitable Viv Cleaver in Kings of the Gym, call the Circa Box Office on 801-7992 or visit www.circa.co.nz. The season runs until 16 February.

The road to Kings of the Gym

Playwright Dave Armstrong talks about the origins of his new play, set in a school gymnasium, Kings of the Gym.

The initial idea for Kings of the Gym probably occurred in the mid-1970s in the gymnasium of my local secondary school. I remember back then that most gymnasiums in co-ed schools were like little man-caves – oases of testosterone where the PE teachers, who were usually male, ruled the roost. In their striped tracksuit trousers, with the ever-present whistles around their necks, these teachers would command us to go on long cross-country runs and play all sorts of games, which were highly competitive and very physical. Most of us enjoyed them but heaven help you if you were overweight, bookish or both. Liberal English, drama and art teachers wouldn’t go near the school gymnasium, preferring the coffee plungers, literary magazines and pottery mugs of the staff room.

Though as a breed, PE teachers seemed to be very different from other teachers, I enjoyed their company immensely. They were almost all uniformly contemptuous of modern, progressive education and perhaps therein lay their appeal. After a day of interactive learning I quite enjoyed playing a highly physical and competitive game of now-forbidden bull-rush in the gym. What interested me is that my liberal teachers, whom I really liked and respected, couldn’t believe that I enjoyed spending time in the company of the ‘Neanderthals’ in the PE department. It was true that these PE teachers could be boorish and insensitive at times, very like Laurie in the play, but I also knew that these kings of the gym really liked kids. And it’s very hard to dislike someone who likes you.

But Kings of the Gym is not really about PE teachers. The gym is merely the setting – that got me thinking about a variety of things. One was that a scummy, dirty gym of a tawdry, failing, low-decile school would be a really challenging place in which to set a romantic comedy.

But as well as being a gym rom-com, Kings of the Gym also looks at a number of issues, not just the obvious ones to do with politics and education, but also wider human issues such as tolerance.

We all think we are tolerant, but real tolerance is another issue altogether. As I was writing this play, a number of social and religious groups such as Destiny Church, Family First and Sensible Sentencing hit the headlines. Some of the members of these groups are highly intolerant, especially of gay rights groups, liberals, prisoners, schoolteachers and judges, to name a few. But I also noticed a growing intolerance amongst people like me to Christians and other conservative groups.

What would happen if people from these opposing groups found themselves all in the same place, say in a school gymnasium? It was then that I realised that even though only one of the four characters in Kings of the Gym is religious, this play is really about a battle for the soul. Each character seems to want every other character to think like them and believe what they believe – and are all prepared to fight to get their way. I found this battle both intriguing and at times very funny.

So how do I describe this battle for the soul set in that most unlikely colosseum – a school gymnasium? Kings of the Gym is definitely a comedy, though perhaps less of a farce than my last play at Circa, The Motor Camp. It features four good-natured, intelligent characters who are fun to be with. Luckily, Kings of the Gym is performed by four good-natured, intelligent actors who are fun to be with, so rehearsals, helmed by my old friend and colleague Danny Mulheron, have been a blast. We were also in the same PE class at school so have had a lot of fun recalling some of the more outrageous events that happened in our run-down, tawdry little school gym.

Kings of the Gym will make you laugh and no doubt rekindle some memories of stubby shorts,  tracksuit trousers, and  rompers in the school gym. But hopefully it will also get you thinking about some of the issues that are of importance in New Zealand today.

Kings of the Gym opens on Saturday, 19 January, with $25 ticket specials for the Preview on Friday, 18 January and the matinee on Sunday, 20 January. To book tickets, call the Circa Box Office on 801-7992 or visit www.circa.co.nz.