Come over here and say that
Invercargill Repertory’s light, laughing new Roger Hall play dances around an issue being taken very seriously indeed in Southland right now: the migrant experience. reports.
A‘‘stupid, stupid country . . . but yes, nice pipple.’’ Hang on. We mightn’t be reporting that right. ‘‘Nice pe-yo-ple’’ Something like that. You’ll know it when you hear it.
When Hannah Kennedy plays a Russian migrant, Natasha, in Repertory’s new comedy A Shortcut to Happiness, the accent isn’t just flavourful. It’s addictive.
To hear it is to be tempted to try it out yourself.
From her petite frame issues masculine tight-throated diction in which a lot of ‘‘y’’ sounds sluttily rub up against innocent ’’e’’ vowels.
So when she calls out to Mark Holmes’ character, Ned, there’s a ‘‘y’’ in the middle of his name.
Kennedy is herself a migrant. Not Russian, but she grew up in Cyprus and went to school with many Russian people so knows full well that they didn’t sound quite like her Natasha at all.
But on stage it works. It just does. Especially when the character is entertainingly reproaching stupidities at every turn.
So when minor staging glitches intrude into rehearsals, it’s easier for Kennedy just to stay in character.
Actually, she confides, ‘‘I quite enjoy losing it as Natasha.’’
A boombox doesn’t start on cue. ‘‘Now my machine not working! Nothing in stupid country ever works!’’
Exiting one scene in a huff, she bangs into a wee table, calling out as she storms out. ‘‘You have stupid furniture in stupid places.’’
Amid just a moment’s forgetfulness she says, reassuringly, ‘‘I know my lines. I know these things.’’
Natasha’s a feisty character, a music teacher abandoned by her partner, trying to make a living cleaning houses and running folk-dancing classes for seniors and middle-agers.
Sympathetically written, Natasha is easy to forgive. Which is just as well.
Her lapses are far from just idiomatic ones to do with the difficulties of the language – like how the phrase is clever dick, not what she said. Natasha’s behaviour isn’t exemplary. ‘‘One of the biggest challenges I found with her is with quite a lot of her lines, she’s just awful,’’ Kennedy says.
‘‘Well, I don’t think she’s awful, she’s just blunt and forthright in a way that perhaps New Zealanders aren’t used to.’’
Roger Hall, whose plays are big draws in Southland, doesn’t hector his audiences. And why would you need to when all (all?) that’s behind this one is a touching romance, a hymn to multiculturalism, friendship, and a suggestion that if we danced and sang more, we’d be the happier for it. It’s not strident, it’s exuberant. And let’s face it, these themes harmonise nicely with a Very Important and Urgent Task underway throughout the province right now.
The Southland Regional Development Strategy, still a work in progress, places great emphasis on the importance of a happy, rewarding migrant experience for the wellbeing, now as well as in the future, of the region.
Kennedy is quick to say that she’s not a migrant who has faced the cultural disorientation that, say, someone from Russia would. She speaks the language and her partner Callum Fowler – himself a pretty fair actor – is a Kiwi.
But since we ask, no, it’s not exactly easy to land here.
‘‘I have been here a couple of years. Now I feel very much a part of Southland, very welcome here. But it doesn’t happen immediately.
‘‘I don’t mean to be remotely disrespectful . . . everyone has been very kind and very welcoming, but we all have to make the effort.’’
Speaking of making an effort leads us to a strong characteristic of this play. The middle-aged dancing.
When veteran director Jonathan Tucker recruited one of his favourite collaborators, Mark Holmes, it was with the airy encouragement: ‘‘come do the play . There’s a little bit of dancing in it.’’
More than just a little. And it turns out it takes discipline and practice to be able to dance quite as badly – but an educated sort of badly – as required for some scenes and as, um, betterly as required in others.
They’ve been well coached, though there’s no getting around it that the process was harder for some cast than others.
For some, says Tucker, they hate it. Loathe it.
It’s been pointed out to him more than once or twice that this is meant to be repertory, not musical theatre.
But isn’t the play, in part, about the joy of dance?
Perhaps more accurately it’s about the discovery of it.
As it happens, when Holmes started his acting career, in 1979, it was with Tucker in a musical, Half a Sixpence.
Yes there was dancing. And yes, there was a process of discovery all right, for both men.
‘‘We started off in the front row of the big dance number and ended up in the back row,’’ Holmes recalls.
‘‘They said we didn’t have to move our feet at all. Just wave our arms around.’’
Look at him now, disporting himself on stage with what certainly looks to be great pleasure.
‘‘It’s always been challenging for me,’’ Holmes admits.
But from his own extensive involvement in musical theatre as well as repertory, he has seen the sheer pleasure dancing has given to so many people.
So yes, he very much agrees. We should dance more.
In some ways, for Holmes this will be a last dance.
With two growing sons who deserve to have their dad around at weekends more, he’s decided this will be his swan-song year.
‘‘It’s nice to finish it with Jonathan.’’Amid the ensemble are, Bev (Dorothy Hart-Brown) and Ray (Andy Wood) as a retired couple senior classcourse junkies from U3A, the University of the Third Age.
Wood’s role, although far from a minor one, is devoid of a single spoken line. Which in itself tells you something about the forcefulness the Bev character.
Wood, in his day job, is the principal of James Hargest College and ordinarily you wouldn’t necessarily say school-aged audiences are the natural catchment for a Roger Hall play.
But the thought arises that one or two of the school’s less respectful students may find themselves tempted to see their principal in a role that could hardly be less authoritarian – hen-pecked to bits and pieces, taking his surreptitious pleasures where he can find them.
And, of course, dancing.
A Shortcut to Happiness runs from today until Saturday, October 1, at Repertory House, Invercargill.