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Otago Daily Times
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
The Court Theatre - back on centre stage
By Eva Kershaw of Frank Film "We stayed the course and my God, we're delighted with what we have." Court Theatre actor and artistic advisor Ross Gumbley is not talking about the new Auckland apartment where curmudgeonly cow-cockie Dickie Hart, his character in the recently opened End of Summer Time by Roger Hall, now lives. Rather, he is talking about the new $56 million theatre building that has been wooing audiences since opening its doors in early May. In helping plan the new theatre, Gumbley and his team attended nearly 2,500 meetings with designers, builders and architects to create a building that is intimate, operational and distinctly home grown. Taking a break from rehearsals, he points to the West Coast blackwood flooring, the laminated timber columns from Rotorua, the steel work made in nearby Bromley that dominate the expansive foyer. 'This foyer is the finest Aotearoa has to offer,' he tells Frank Film. Education and engagement manager Ben O'Brien-Limmer is similarly enthusiastic. 'We're really pinching ourselves, just what a gift this is,' he says. The Court Theatre had been without a purpose-built home since its establishment in 1971. Just months after being evicted from its home in The Arts Centre by the 2011 earthquake, the Court opened its new home in The Shed, a reformed railway shed in Addington. Back-of-house was cold and occasionally leaky and the stage was too big for most sets, but still, 'our audience fell in love with Addington,' says Gumbley. When the Christchurch City Council agreed to fund the new theatre building as an anchor for the arts in the post-earthquake city rebuild, it was important to get it right. 'They wanted a building that you walked into and was warm and inviting, the antithesis of corporate,' says Athfield Architects' Matthew Webby, who was employed to design the theatre alongside UK theatre specialists Haworth Tompkins. In a sea of large glass and aluminium buildings that has come to define the new CBD, that sense of intimacy and materiality was considered critical to the design of the building and the theatre spaces. 'At this scale of auditorium you can get a really close connection between audience and actor,' says Webby. From the front row seats of the Stewart Family Theatre, which can fit an audience of 379 people, the stage and its performers are within arms' reach. In the Wakefield Family Front Room auditorium, artistic director Alison Walls says seating for 150 people can be adapted for a traverse or round stage, allowing the audience to wrap around a performance completely. The acoustics are just as immersive. Gumbley says that from the back of the house, you can hear the pages of a script being turned back-stage. In the control booth, technician Geoff Nunn says the theatre's technical rig is 'exactly the same' as you'd find in London's West End theatres. It is not just experienced actors enjoying the new spaces. In one of the rehearsal rooms, associate artistic director Tom Bain takes a crew of young actors through the steps for The Spongebob Musical: Youth Edition, the first junior show in the new theatre opening on 1 July. 'It's colourful, it's joyous, it's over the top,' he says. With an already well-established patronage, many of whose names are engraved on the back of the theatre's seats, the Court Theatre is focussed on engaging Christchurch youth. The company runs three youth groups, offering acting classes for various age levels and culminating in youth-led productions. 'There's always been a focus on bringing through that next generation of performer and live theatre goer,' says O'Brien-Limmer. 'However, it's reached a whole new level coming into a space like this.' The Court Theatre is Aotearoa's only producing house with all its departments under the same roof. Looking through the windows from Colombo Street, the public can see straight into the theatre workshop, where the company designs and constructs all sets, props and costumes for its shows. 'It wouldn't be the dream job if I had to carry this stuff from one location to here,' says workshop manager Matthew Duffy, who now has direct access to the main stage. "He gestures to a prop he built recently for Spongebob – the front half of the Krusty Krab burger joint – which would only be on stage for a minute or so. 'It's a smaller stage (than Addington), so it's better for us,' he says. 'We can spend more time per square metre. Two months on from the theatre's opening, says Gumbley, it is still very much early days for the theatre, 'but you know, we're going to get this right.' -Frank Film
Otago Daily Times
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
'The first time I had a firearm pointed at me was when I was 14'
By Eva Kershaw, for Frank Film Jacob Bryant is drawn to danger. 'I think you're born with it,' says the intrepid cinematographer, renowned for his work in some of the world's most volatile environments. Bryant grew up causing trouble in Le Bons Bay, Banks Peninsula, shooting possums and rolling cars in the surrounding hills. 'The first time I had a firearm pointed at me was when I was 14-years-old,' says Bryant, 'so suddenly, you're in Kabul and you've got someone coming up with an AK47 and putting it through the car window... I was able to deal with it more rationally, I think.' 'I always knew that if he survived, he'd be great,' his mother, Louise McKay, tells Frank Film. And he is great. Having filmed in Iraq, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and beyond, Bryant's work with leading documentary makers has been nominated for multiple screen awards. Bryant attributes his success to skills he wasn't taught at school. Rather, it seems the kids who cannot sit still in a classroom are often perfect for the jobs that rely on instinct more than instruction. At a young age, Bryant inherited his father's '22 gauge rifle. 'I could only carry 2 or 3 possums at a time because I was so little,' says Bryant, 'but that physicality - running around these hills, climbing, walking, building things - that stuck with me my whole life.' Sitting still was (and continues to be) almost impossible for Bryant. He struggled with academics, and his tertiary education ended after his first year of highschool. 'It was deeply unpleasant - the idea of just sitting in one place,' he says. 'I was really driven to do as much as I could in my life, and school really got in the way of that.' By the age of 18, Bryant had written off eight cars, was barred from every pub on Banks Peninsula, and had been arrested. 'I had such a reputation. For being a fuckwit actually,' he says. But as Bryant's mother puts it, whilst he had a knack for causing trouble, he was always polite. Bryant realised while sitting in the holding cells of the Christchurch Central Police Station at the age of eighteen that it was not his place. 'If this was my future, this was absolutely not who I was,' he recalls thinking. Bryant moved to London in his early 20s, and bought a Super 8 camera from Portobello Market. From there, he forged a career in cinematography, working on stories for the BBC, CNN, TWI and Insight during his first three years of work. 'That that's all I ever wanted to do,' says Bryant. 'To shoot pictures and be able to show the world – the world that I was experiencing – to other people.' 'He certainly has an eye for beauty,' says McKay. 'He has empathy for people that he feels are being treated wrongly.' Countless times, across three decades, Bryant has visisted the world's trouble-spots and put himself at risk to tell the stories of others. The most notable occasion, perhaps, was in 2015. Māori Television was pursuing a story on the Israeli blockade on Gaza. A flotilla of vessels was trying the break through the blockade, and Bryant was employed as the cameraman. 'There were definitely risks attached to that,' says Bryant. He had heard of instances where Israeli military had boarded flotilla vessels and shot several activists onboard. 'We were gonna have to do some pretty drastic things to get those pictures off [the boat].' -Frank: Stories from the South episode three
