PREVIEW: Tribes (Silo)
Rejoining the tribe [by Sharu Delilkan]
(L-R) Catherine Wilkin, Fern Sutherland, Michael Hurst and Jodie Hillock during rehearsal.
Although it has been almost four years since her Silo debut, Fern Sutherland still remembers the experience as if it were yesterday.
"It was my first gig out of [UNITEC] drama school and I was extremely nervous when I met Shane [Bosher]. I felt very insecure and was desperate to make a good impression," she admits.
That's when she played an old woman in Life is a Dream working with Bosher, who's directing Silo's latest show Tribes.
However in Tribes, playing Ruth the middle child of a bohemian, intellectual upper-middle-class British family, the 24-year-old Sutherland says she feels slightly more at ease and able to enjoy the process.
PREVIEW: The Lion in the Winter (The Pumphouse Theatre)
A timeless classic [by Sharu Delilkan]
L to R: Brendan Lovell (King Philip II), Alex Walker ( Geoffrey), Emma Fenton (Princess Alais), Erroll Shand (King Henry II), Elliot Wrightson (Richard the Lionheart), Louise Wallace (Eleanor of Aquitaine) and Daniel Bonner (John).
Although The Lion in the Winter has been around since the 1960s, it's actor Brendan Lovell's first time acting in, let alone reading the play.
The 27-year-old actor admits he had never heard of American playwright James Goldman’s play, that debuted on Broadway in 1966, until the audition.
But he's by no means new to acting. Far from it, Lovell's been in the public eye since popping out of an oven as The Gingerbread Man at age 4.
And even though he didn’t go straight into acting following high school, his long hiatus came to a close in 2010 when he found himself back on stage in a series of pantomime plays, while studying screen acting at the South Seas Film and Television School.
“I didn’t realise how much I missed the buzz of being on stage until I did those pantomimes. I was playing a musician in Pinocchio and the reaction from the kids who booed me off stage and wouldn’t let me sing the song was absolutely amazing,” he said.