Read me something…
My earliest memory of Theatre is watching, at the age of five, my father perform in a farce with local amateur group The Piopio Players. He played a character who was hospitalised with a leg in a cast; but wanting to make amour with a nurse on the lower floor descended out a window on a rope of sheets. There was an enormous crash and the curtains closed; when they re-opened, he was back in bed with two legs in plaster. When the play had finished I went onto the stage and looked out the window he had fallen from and still remember feeling a vindication of my assumption, tinged with a sense of play and mystery for out the window there was a drop of less than a meter to the floor of the War Memorial Hall.
Being of a nature to not shy away from putting myself forward I was throughout school and college shoulder tapped to sing and make speeches and was often given responsibility to organise and create events of drama and music.
After high-school I went to Hamilton Teachers Training College but this lasted only a year before I escaped to Christchurch. I put myself in front of Yvette Bromley at The Court Theatre. She later rang and invited me to meet Mervyn Thompson, playwright and infamous raconteur; we met in his office at the university. He took a complete works of Shakespeare off the shelf and said, “Read me something”. I read Mark Anthony and he turned to Yvette saying, “Yes Yvette, I see what you mean”.
I was on my way.
My first professional engagement as an actor was performing for The Court Theatre in The Pongo Plays; venue the Christchurch Square during the 1974 Commonwealth Games. Randall Wackrow built a carnival wagon using sulky wheels which we dragged from the Court Theatre on Worcester St to the Square. Literally dragged due to an engineering fault which had the wheels mounted on a weak axel causing them to rub against the side of the wagon to the point of being unable to turn. Ian Gilmour, Francis Edmond, Cathy Downes and I made up the troupe. My elder brother Andrew was in Melbourne at this time and one morning opened the Melbourne Age to be confronted with a photograph of me proclaiming in red nose and painted costume. Various other engagements with Court Theatre followed through 1974 including my role as the Squire in the musical Canterbury Tales. Dickie Johnston directed and created many tableau, beds painted on standing flats had characters standing up in bed, creating opportunity for action such as the Wife of Bath, played by the inestimable Millie Woods, to be seen vacating her own bed to join the Squire. In another tableau I held a 14 second kiss with Cathy Downes. She was completely professional of course, not a sigh, not a flutter.
I attended New Zealand Drama School gaining a place in the 1975 intake. In the summer of 1976 I went on tour with Red Mole Enterprises playing an eclectic little holiday camping ground show called Vargos Circus. I returned to drama school in March 1976 but when the Moles invited me to join them on tour of the South Island in July/August I left drama school and so began my Red Mole voyage.
New Zealand Drama School 1976