Master still learning the craft of acting
Michael Hurst’s voice is exactly what you want and what you expect. Glorious and resonant, warm honey and woodsmoke, it’s coming down the line from Takaka where he stands, amazed in the sunshine, looking over the paddocks that surround his motel.
He’s midway through his Arts On Tour season of No Holds Bard, cruising down the country with his son, Cameron, running the lights and helping pack in. ‘‘He’s been terrific,’’ Hurst says. ‘‘We’re having a great road trip.’’ This kind of in-and-out theatre is something new for Hurst, famous in most Kiwi minds for his work on Hercules, but who is a hugely experienced and celebrated film, television and theatre actor and director, he is a celebrated stunt performer, fight choreographer and in 2005 was made Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2005 for services to film and the theatre.
‘‘There’s only two of us on the road so we have to do it all. One of the things I’m really enjoying is going to any space and going, ‘Right, we’ll do this, or, we’ll do it this way’, or we’ll change things up to fit the spaces, rolling with the punches and we have we can use whatever’s there.
‘‘It’s really pared back and I just love it,’’ he says.
‘‘Just the idea we roll up, we put our gear in and it’s sleeves up what I call ‘proper theatre’, proper work.’’
Theatre being work is a theme Hurst comes back to time and again.
His career began as an old fashioned apprentice actor at the Court Theatre in Christchurch, learning the ropes by doing a lot of acting – rehearsing one play during the day and performing another at night. Acting was treated much like a trade, you learned at the side of more experienced people while on the job – something that now just doesn’t happen, he says.
‘‘I’m trying to get across to people that we need to develop this, we need to bring companies back where actors get more than one job a year otherwise they can’t build on their craft,’’ he says.
‘‘If you don’t preserve these techniques they will disappear.’’
You’re never too old to learn, too, he says, and he’s honestly relishing the lessons he’s learning on this tour.
‘‘This has been brilliant for me, I’m really, really enjoying it.’’
He says in some ways it’s a matter of consolidating what he’s learned in his 42 years as an actor, but in other ways he’s learning new things every night.
And having the sense to react to new opportunities is something that comes with experience, he says.
‘‘That’s the thing that experience brings you – knowledge and discipline. And with theatre it is about repetition, to an extent, and being disciplined about knowing when the audience is moving away from you and what to do to pull it back,’’ he says.
‘‘Often I see young people, young actors, who are great, good actors, you know, nothing wrong with their acting. And they try and get experimental and they don’t know how to reign it in or when to stop.’’
And it’s that knowledge that has seen No Holds Bard evolve into the show audiences will be treated to on this tour. A collaboration with writer/directors Natalie Medlock and Dan Musgrove, it was born of an idea Hurst had around seven years ago.
‘‘It’s grown and changed as I’ve grown as well.
‘‘I’ve changed and I’ve added things, I’ve got a few new surprises for people on this particular tour that I’ve never done before and I think in all honesty, hand on heart, this is the best version of the show that I’ve done so far.
‘‘The more you do it the more you develop it the better it gets, it’s a living thing.
‘‘It’s a funny, crazy, mad show. ‘‘The actual performance is still as intense as I’ve ever done it and ever want to do it, so in a way the simplicity of the packing in and the set itself allows me to really focus just on doing some really, really – hopefully – some really strong work.’’
‘‘That’s the thing that experience brings you – knowledge and discipline.’’ Michael Hurst
No Holds Bard
Driven to the brink by the infidelity of his wife and a lack of acting opportunities, an aging thespian confronts his demons in what he hopes will be a final ‘‘dark night of the soul’’. The problem is, his demons are as crazy as he is.
A glorious tour de force in which four of Shakespeare’s greatest creations (a foul-mouthed Macbeth, a confused Hamlet, a know-it-all Othello, and a really hungry King Lear) come kicking and screaming into the bursting, deranged brain of a single man at SIT Centrestage Theatre, Invercargill, on Friday.