“To be quite honest at the very beginning I just saw it as another acting job and I was just happy to be working with Jason so I just said yes. I think it was the second day of rehearsals when I started thinking, ‘Oh my god this is just something completely different’. There are a few practical cues – a music cue or a sound cue, the very obvious ones. I’ll know where there’s a bit of a break coming up where I can have a bit of a breather for a second, but for a lot of it you actually can’t. The character is talking directly to the audience the whole time. It shatters that fourth wall. The character is begging for the audience to respond and they do – they respond vocally, they respond in many different ways. That’s what was so terrifying. Not knowing how the audience were going to respond. When you finally, eventually get that response then all the timing and the stuff you’ve prepared goes out the window because you’ve just got to go with what they’ve given you.”
The production came about as a result of the friendship between Hyde and his director Jason Langley. “We’d worked together before in a production where we were both acting. If I’m quite honest I’d never heard of McIvor. I went to go and see a one-person show with Jason, and it was kind of average to be honest. It made Jason go, ‘I know an even better one-person show than that’ and he mentioned Here Lies Henry. He just mentioned it to me in passing without even the slightest hint of doing it. I looked it up online and bought a copy. I called him the next day. It’s an amazing text. As soon as I read it I pitched the idea to him and it went from there.
“Jason had directed a one-person show previously and so he had very strict rules about how the rehearsal was going to operate. He said we were only going to rehearse for no longer than four hours. With a cast of ten you’d do a full day, maybe eight, nine, ten hours, but when it’s just the two of you it’s just too intense. He laid the ground work and said that anyone at any time could call time out if we needed a break, a breather, if it was just too much. I think it’s testament to how well we work together that we got through it so well.”
Henry, the character at the centre of the play, has an almost compulsive aversion to the truth – a characteristic which Hyde thinks makes audiences examine the way they relate to the world. “The character says at the very beginning, quite openly, that he’s a liar. A self-confessed liar. Jason and I had these huge conversations at the beginning of rehearsals about why people do that. You do it, I do it. People do it to make themselves more interesting. Sometimes, as in the case of Henry, reality can be too harsh and too confronting. He’s someone who is incredibly troubled and really not very well. Slowly over the course of the play these little pieces of himself keep coming out. You can see why he might create this fantasy and why he might have an aversion to the truth. In the case of many people they create a fantasy in their head to keep the distance from that reality. But I think first and foremost it’s usually to make themselves feel more interesting. It’s something we all do. Don’t we all want to be liked? Don’t we all want to be funny and interesting?”
Hyde will be performing Here Lies Henry as part of this month’s Midsumma Festival. “The theatre I’ve seen in Melbourne has been of an incredibly high standard so I’m very excited to be a part of that. Anyone who likes their theatre short, sharp and intense, I’d definitely suggest coming along.”
BY JOSH FERGEUS
