Interview: To Old Red Lion via Ireland, New Zealand and Ukraine

Owen Lindsay on bringing a New Zealand classic to London

Restless Ecstasy Theatre Company bring The Daylight Atheist, a new Zealand Classic to Old Red Lion Theatre for it’s UK premiere. We caught up with Artistic Director and actor Owen Lindsay to find out more about his journey and what London can expect from this Kiwi gem.

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Kia ora Owen, thank you for taking the time to chat with us today. Could you give us a quick idea of what audiences can expect from The Daylight Atheist?

Kia Ora, thanks for having me. So the play is regarded as a modern New Zealand classic; it’s a funny, moving, sometimes coarse and always involving portrait of a man unmoored from his home, his family and often his own good sense. It’s a solo narrative play, detailing his travels and travails, and told with an acerbic wit as well as warm humanity.

What can you share about your character Danny Moffat?

He’s obviously a complex guy, very emotionally damaged and struggling with his own inner demons. But like most Irish men, has a wicked sense of humour, and the extraordinary thing about him is how he manages to find moments of levity and lightness even in the grimmest of circumstances.

Tell us a little about yourself, Irish born and New Zealand bred, with experience in theatre in Vienna and Ukraine. Could you share a bit about your journey and how these different theatre experiences have shaped you?

How long have you got? Like you say I was born in Dublin, and spent the first two years living in Greystones, Co. Wicklow. We moved to New Zealand when I was only two years old, so NZ was all that I knew growing up. Nevertheless there was also this weird sense of dislocation, of not belonging solely to that place. It’s a feeling of other-ness you could say, that ́s pretty intrinsic to the expat experience. As a first-generation immigrant, you’ve no family network around you besides your parents and siblings, so you always know that there’s a part of you that’s somewhere else. As a kid I was a movie geek; I made my own short films with friends, took courses at local schools, and dreamed about being a film director. I discovered theatre at University in Auckland, originally as a way to meet women, but pretty quickly found something uniquely compelling about the whole world of live performance, and it became my focus, eventually leading to an MA in Drama Studies. The department there had a split focus: about 50-50 theory and practice, with the practice similarly divided between a very physical, Jacques Lecoq influence and a more academic, cerebral approach from Russian Stanislavski tradition. I was lucky to have number of very fine tutors, including Stewart Young, Murray Edmond, Justin Lewis, Jacob Rajan, Margaret- Mary Hollins and Raymond Hawthorne. Upon graduating I acted locally in Auckland for awhile, and worked in the technical department at the Aotea Centre to make ends meet.

Unfortunately NZ’s arts and culture scene is tiny, even by economy of scale, so in 2005 I packed my bags and headed to Dublin, looking to reconnect with my roots and pursue greater opportunities. That was a very important few years, as a jobbing actor in a very condensed, but still very lively scene. I kept looking for opportunities to learn and grow as well as work, taking different actor’s workshops and working in as many fields of live theatre as I could obtain access to. I also met my now wife (and producing partner), during an Opera production at the Gaiety Theatre, where I was part of the non-singing chorus. Eventually though, Dublin got to be a bit restrictive; I could never truly be “Irish” there, if that makes sense. New Zealand had formed too much of my experience for me to ever really belong there, I guess. So in 2009 I once again upped stakes and moved to London, spending a year the Drama Centre to upskill myself and then another 6 years doing the rounds of British theatre. I did a lot of touring and a lot of London fringe projects without ever really cracking it. I also found my interest veering more and more back to directing, and we formed Restless Ecstasy in 2014 specifically to pursue this angle.

Like Auckland and Dublin, London never really felt like home, so in 2015, with a certain referendum on the horizon, we shifted to Europe where an opportunity had presented itself to work with an English-langauge company called Open House Theatre, and Vienna has been home ever since. It’s allowed us to pursue opportunities in more selective way, and provided exposure to a great diversity of different theatre practices from around the world. It’s also afforded me the opportunity to live and work in a number of wonderful new places, including the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany and, as you mention, in pre-war Ukraine, where I was parachuted in to direct the world premiere of a new nationalist play in the Ukrainian language, starring A-list local actors and performed in a former Tsarist-era concert house. Talk about being culturally dislocated!

And what about the playwright Tom Scott? I asked a number of Kiwi friends about him, he is primarily known for his political cartoons but this play has been performed throughout NZ and Australia for more than 20 years.

Tom’s a great guy, real original, and has been very supportive of the project behind the scenes. He’s been a noted political satirist and written successfully for TV and film, as well as print media in New Zealand, across a career that spans several decades now. The Daylight Atheist was his first theatrical effort, and it’s been an enormously popular play ever since it debuted in 2002. Along with Gary Henderson‘s Skin Tight, which I also produced a few years ago, it’s probably one of the best-known and popular titles in the NZ theatre canon. We’re very proud and excited to be able to give it it’s first production outside of Australasia.

How did you first come across Tom’s work and what specifically captivated you about ‘The Daylight Atheist’ that led you to be so involved in bringing this to the UK for the first time?

I was fortunate enough to attend the original production of The Daylight Atheist from the Auckland Theatre Company, starring a brilliant local actor named Stuart Devenie, back in 2002. It struck a real chord back then, not simply for the quality of its writing and the skill of that staging, both of which were outstanding, but also for the way it eloquently described a lot of the emotional conflict that I myself felt as an uprooted Irishman. I watched it alongside my own father, whose own story it in many ways paralleled, so it became a piece that has always stayed with me. Danny Moffat is my Hamlet, if you will. It’s been a labour of love to bring it to a UK audience for the first time; I’m finally the right age to attempt the role, and we hope this production will be the start of a longer journey that will allow us to bring the play to audiences in Ireland as well, both North and South.

Getting back to this production, have you had to make any changes to bring it to the UK, were there any jokes or references which might not travel?

Not really any changes. Inevitably there will be one or two references that might sail over people ́s heads in London: a famous quote by former All Blacks captain Sean Fitzpatrick forms the punchline to one section, for instance, so it may or may not land the same. But you take the piece as it is and try to do it proper justice.

With the play’s focus on a one character sifting through memories in a cluttered bedroom, it seems to me like the lovely intimate space of Old Red Lion really fits?

Yeah it’s an ideal setting. To me the ORL always feels like sitting in someone’s living room, watching a play. They’re very supportive and open as a venue, too, which is one of the real draw-cards for a production like this, which is independently funded and basically relies on the kindness of strangers.

Finally, what would like your London audience to take away from The Daylight Atheist?

We would love it if you’d come and experience a slice of life from a country far, far away, and hear a voice from an arts culture that’s too little known outside of its own small island borders. Hopefully, they can come away knowing that there’s more to New Zealand than pretty landscapes, Hobbits, rugby and sheep.

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Our thanks to Owen for taking the time to chat with us.

The Daylight Atheist plays at Old Red Lion Theatre from April 16 to May 04. Further information and tickets are available here.