Neville’s Island

Craig Reucassel, David Lynch, Andrew Hansen and Chris Taylor in Neville's Island (supplied photo)

By Elissa Blake

Acting’s a doddle, says The Chaser’s Andrew Hansen. Not that he admits to being any good at it.

“For me, it’s the wonderful experience of not having written the damn thing,” he says, ahead of the opening of Neville’s Island, a comic play starring Hansen and Chaser colleagues Chris Taylor and Craig Reucassel, staged at the Ensemble Theatre.

“You are responsible for less. As a writer-performer, you get blamed for everything,” Hansen says. “Here, I’m just an actor and this script is fantastic so it doesn’t really matter how terrible I am.”

Neville’s Island, a British comedy, will be Hansen’s mainstage acting debut. “I haven’t attempted serious acting since I was a student,” he says.
For Taylor and Reucassel, it’s a return to the same stage they made their debuts on last year in David Williamson’s comedy Jack of Hearts.

A second crack at a real acting gig was too good an offer to turn down, says Taylor.

“Craig and I didn’t absolutely cover ourselves in glory in Jack of Hearts but we didn’t completely suck either,” he says. “Clearly, we’re not great thespians, but we enjoyed it enough to want to come back and learn a little bit more. It’s a lovely change of gear from the quick turnaround, non-analytical nature of television. In theatre, you have time to sit down in a room together and talk about the text and characters. I think we got a little bit addicted to that.”

“Normally on TV you only get to do something once,” Reucassel adds. “Now I can get it wrong every night.”

It was during the season of Jack of Hearts that Reucassel came across Neville’s Island, a play written in the early 1990s by Tim Firth (Calendar Girls, Kinky Boots) about a quartet of middle managers and a corporate team-building exercise that goes terribly and hilariously wrong.

“I was reading lots of the plays on the shelves backstage and Neville’s Island was one of them,” Reucassel explains. “I was loving it, and then I looked at the cast list printed in the script and one of them was Mark Kilmurry. I thought, that’s a coincidence. This guy has the same name as our Mark Kilmurry [the Ensemble Theatre’s Artistic Director]. I didn’t know our Mark was one of the original cast of the first American production of the play. So we got talking.”

Neville’s Island strands four middle-aged guys in the freezing wilderness. Neville (played by David Lynch, the “real actor” on stage and straight guy to the three comedians) is the team leader. Angus (Reucassel) is a shallow materialist. Roy (Hansen) is a born again Christian and devoted birdwatcher. Gordon (Taylor) is the jester of the group. 

“Gordon is the last man you would ever want to be stranded on an island with,” says Taylor. “He’s relentlessly sarcastic and in this terrible crisis, he uses humour as a weapon. What starts as a casual put down always seems to turn into full-on character assassination. I actually don’t feel super great playing him, sometimes. I go home feeling a bit dirty.”

Firth has a keen eye for male frailties, says Hansen. “I think any man who works with other men will recognise it. As The Chaser we have occasionally regressed to the Neolithic ancestor state in some of our interactions.”

Has The Chaser ever resorted in back-to-nature team bonding exercises to get the creative juices flowing?

“Once we went on a so-called writers’ retreat,” Taylor says. “I think it was prior to the third season of War on Everything and we all took a house in Kangaroo Valley together. My only recollection of it was how incredibly unproductive it was. We mostly played tennis all day because that was more fun than writing anything.”

“We nearly came back with The Chaser’s War on Tennis,” Hansen adds. “It was so bad.”

Likening it to “Lord of the Flies for middle managers”, Taylor says he’s found Neville’s Island to be a demanding piece. “It’s very much a crowd-pleaser in that there’s a joke every three lines, but it also turns very dark in the second half. It’ll be interesting for us to see how the audience responds.

“I think the chief pleasure will be seeing us looking very uncomfortable. We are completely drenched when we come on, and we have to get changed on stage. Even if you don’t like the jokes you might enjoy looking at our freezing bodies and goosebumps.”

Neville's Island is playing at Ensemble Theatre until August 12, 2017.

This story was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald on June 23, 2017.