IMAGINE a world where you’re the only person around, naked, in an incubator.
For Wellington actor Francis Mountjoy, these aren’t just imaginings. He’s now stripped off everything to perform a one-man show about human conditioning.
Mysteriously, the man – who grew up in a commune and who was introduced to arts by his grandmother – is nonplussed about the experience.
“Funnily enough, the nudity is actually ok. The only problem is things getting in the way a bit – trying not to bare my orifice to the audience,” Mountjoy laughs down the phone.
When pressed, he (almost) admits that he is slightly concerned about getting naked to sit in a machine – the incubator - in front of a whole bunch of people he doesn’t know.
“I’m more nervous about my performance coming off.”
Mountjoy’s got quite a theatrical history with Wellington. His grandmother started Khandallah Arts Theatre in 1959, which ties in with his Gene Pool production.
After growing up in a commune in the far north of Coromandel, Mountjoy had never seen TV or films, and said it wasn’t until age 11 when he moved to the capital and spent time with his grandmother that he “found the thrill of being on stage”.
In his second role he dressed in a tutu to play a cave sprite in Aladdin’s Lamp. As a 14-year-old he performed the plays written by his then economics teacher Bernard Beckett – a Wellington writer who, as an aside, wrote the novel Genesis that drew the largest advance offered for a young adult novel in New Zealand.
As a teen Mountjoy took time off from acting to travel but quickly got tired of “snowboarding in Canada or the dance season in Europe”, and decided to come home, where, as a hospo worker, nabbed a job at Downstage. He found his niche. And, as they say: got in through the back door.
To date, his highlight is not playing an orc in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, but taking two-person play NuiSila around high schools in the country, where again he was put under the spotlight: limited props, no lights, a whole lot of schools.
“We had to work really hard,” he says. Well intensity must be his thing given his Gene Pool project: “Just me. No clothes. A machine”.
Gene Pool, Bats Theatre, to November 6