The Power of Wisdom
ON MAKING AND TAKING OPPORTUNITIES:
ANAPELA POLATAIVAO: I’ve been in this business since I was 15 so that’s more than 25 years of forming relationships. I can’t imagine what it would be like if I started right now; it almost feels as if I needed that as a foundation because it’s only now I can start to make my work — it’s been like 25 years of building, philosophising and figuring it all out. I haven’t even really started. Making my own work has been hugely important. There’s a huge sense of responsibility because I understand we are a minority but also the importance of the Pasifika female voice. We don’t have a Judi Dench or a Helen Mirren; this is a new world I entered and had to navigate myself through and find my connections with a very Western world view. That was the only way for me to anchor “me” inside this and to realise, “Oh, it’s stories! It’s people telling stories and that was like Sunday school,” That’s probably where it all started, at church and Sunday school.
RTW: I do tend to get cast in comedy but I try to do as much that isn’t [comedy] as possible to keep it flexible for myself so I don’t get too boxed. I like challenges from all different walks of life and I don’t want to be a brand for one thing but it’s really hard to knock that on the head once establishments have decided that that’s how they are going to make money out of you. Convincing people that you are capable of doing other things is difficult when they can see it’s easy to get you recognisable by sticking to one thing but that happens throughout the arts.
LC: Unemployment is always the low. The longest I have been out of work? Fully out of work? I want to say 18 months to two years; usually I write so when that happened for me, I wrote three plays and put them on in 18 months. Mcleod’s Daughters was a high because it was such a challenge for me as an actor to pull off that character in that environment and be believed because I was very much a city girl from Auckland, New Zealand who was vegetarian and all kind of spiritually woo-wa. Yet I was playing this extremely grounded and earthy meat-eating woman living in a man’s world doing a man’s work. I loved the challenge of immersing myself in that environment and trying to become a believable part of it. It was my decision to leave Mcleod’s and I asked for the character to be killed off because she would never leave that property; she’d even said that in previous episodes so I wanted to honour the character and that was the only way to do it.
AQ: When I came out of drama school in the 1980s, I got a year’s contract; nowadays, people will be lucky to get one [theatre] show per year but there is more television and film so there’s a wider range. However, while there’s more opportunity there is more competition so sometimes I think it’s harder now than it was before. There is a lot of pressure to do it for less and, wages-wise, it’s a race to the bottom. When you audition, you’re often asked whether you can be available almost instantly. Juxtapose this with a Creative NZ report that says freelance actors in this country earn $35,000 a year, which is pathetic. So, you go to an audition and you
are asked to be available from July through to November but that assumes you are not doing anything at all in your life. There are so many things to be riled by today — climate change, mental health — but, for me, I think it’s equal pay and representation. It’s about people — not just in the performance industry but in life in general — being paid for the work they do and being paid fairly. Look at some of those CEO salaries.
But money isn’t the be all and end all of everything, there are other ways of living and measuring success and we need to teach that to our children. When did how much money you have become the only measure of success in life? Or how many houses you own? There are thousands and thousands of people who will never own a house but that is certainly not the only measure of a good and happy life. RTW: I find I now want more security; I want more definition of what’s happening during a year rather than just never knowing. That’s all very appealing when you’re young, always on a mystery, always on this endless mystery journey of not knowing what comes next. You know, you’re tumbleweed and it is exciting because you don’t know where you’re going to roll next. It can be wonderful but once you get into the space where they want to brand you, you know where the tumbleweed is going so your job is to go against the wind and try to go in another direction. JWL: I never know what’s around the corner. I have played some extraordinary roles in my life and I could have quite happily died then and there. I don’t think too far ahead. I don’t think any actor can, because you really don’t know what’s around the corner and it’s been like that for 37 years for me. I probably know what I am doing until March next year but I don’t know after that what I’m doing. Once I left the safety of a theatre company, it’s all I’ve ever known. You just have to hope that good work gets you good work.
ON KEEPING ON KEEPING ON:
AP: My oldest boy, Rocky, who is 17, is now onstage with me in Club Paradiso. I wanted to pave a pathway for my kids to make life a little bit easier. He’s good at school — he’s good at science and all the things that were never my strengths. I was never a mathematician but he gets numbers and I think, “Good on you” but he wants to do acting and that’s hard. The whole thing about how the planet is changing, what am I leaving my kids and have I set them up enough to ensure that if anything happens to me in the next eight minutes that they were going to be okay — I am totally in that zone and thinking about how life is fragile. I know no one is going to get out of here alive but I think about what am I doing to contribute to my children’s paths? Have I given them enough tools for life?
HD: We rely on each other; we rely on our families to step up for us. We [she and partner ATC artistic director Colin Mccoll and daughter Miro] now live in a pocket community because there’s literally a village of people to help look after our child when we’re not available. There are seven little townhouses and we share gardens and chickens;
we share food. We have our own body corporate and it’s a great way to live, it’s sharing the load, really.
AQ: When Jacinda Ardern took the job [of Prime Minister] and Mark Richardson said, “Don’t we think we have a right to know?”’ in terms of her family plans, we went back to work and said, “I hope she is breastfeeding in Parliament” and then she was and I thought, “That’s gold!” I thought [it was] fantastic because women with children are incredibly well-organised — they have to be. I remember a male actor saying to me, “I am exhausted.” I remember thinking, “I’ve just been up three times last night and you are a man who slept alone and slept through the night and you really should not use that word in front of me.”
RTW: Does rejection get any easier to deal with? Well, it depends how much you want something. Sometimes you audition for things that you don’t really know if you want or something else comes along at the same time and you have to choose. But, no, it doesn’t get easier and, to be perfectly honest, if I really, really did want something, I usually hope that their shows fails initially but then, after about 10 minutes, that clears up!
LC: I found my early 20s really challenging; a friend died of leukaemia; I’d done five years of back to back work, I wasn’t good at communicating with people and I wasn’t really connecting with anyone. It all resulted in a breakdown and that was a terrible time but also a wonderful one in that I learned how to better communicate and connect, to develop a “tool box” [of wellness skills] so I would never go down that black hole again. I went on a journey of learning to look after myself and I feel strongly about passing that knowledge on to others.
I find I now want more security ... [It’s] all very appealing when you’re young, [to be] always on a mystery journey of not knowing what comes next.
— Rima Te Wiata