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Max Cullen, 'The Daylight Atheist'.
My chat with Max Cullen is delayed as rehearsals for his solo
performance, 'The Daylight Atheist', run overtime. Considering
the show had a season in Sydney earlier in the year, I'm surprised
that Cullen is rehearsing at all, let alone with this intensity.
But he soon explains and it becomes clear that this performer
is entirely unwilling to rest on his laurels.
"Oh, it's like learning the whole thing all over again. And coming up with new ideas that have to be worked in. It's like a completely new production to me: there are some things that hang over and are really easy, but it's got to be new and different. The stage feels different - it's a bit bigger - and things mature and develop over that time... it will probably be more confident, more assured."
'The Daylight Atheist' is the story of Dan Moffat, a deeply flawed and booze-fuelled husband and father. Moffat sounds like someone we all recognise, and someone in whom we all see ourselves to a degree.
"He's - on paper - such an unsympathetic character. He's isolated from the rest of his family because he's such an unpleasant character. But in the outside world he's Mr Charm and everybody loves him. To show both sides of him, he has to be really nasty when he's talking to his family and a really pleasant guy when he's talking to the audience."
But that's not all Cullen has to master, and the reason behind the rehearsals becomes clear. "I have to play so many different characters in the thing - he plays his own parents, and he plays his auntie and grandma, he plays his wife, and the kids, and he plays the blokes in the pub, and the people in the Air Force and he plays his best mate Jack... he's talking to himself a lot. He's in a room, talking to himself. And I s'pose he's in the alcoholic horrors. He's an Irishman who's a storyteller."
With a central character like Moffat, and a cast like the above, preparation immediately before taking the stage is crucial. "It always takes a bit of preparation, and if you go on unprepared it's really, really difficult. You've really got to isolate yourself and get yourself into that mode. The way I was trained, it was sort of a method training that I had, and you had to know the history of the character you're playing and where he's coming from; and once you realise that - once the actor realises that - the audience sees it. If you've got the right idea in your head, the audience is aware of it.
"There was one afternoon, it was a schools audience. A girl in the audience suddenly burst out with... I had taken her there; I was just like her grandfather who had only died a couple of months earlier. And she was in tears... because she really didn't get to know him, so I just had to sort of talk her down, and tell her how much he must have loved her from the things that he said."
Not only does that underline the importance of rehearsal and preparation, but it illustrates the power of Cullen's performance - not to mention his humanity - better than any critic's prose ever could.
Wade Howland
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Max Cullen in 'The Daylight Atheist' opens in The Space on Fri 9 Sept.
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