Why Suzanne is having a Devil of a time | Wairarapa News | Local News in Wairarapa

Award-winning British playwright Suzanne Andrade says she is actually a nice person despite the darkling slapstick that sometimes flows from her pen.

"I'm really, actually, a nice person. But there's something definitely twisted up there."

She recalls with absolute fondness the learning mentor job kneading play dough and finger painting with shy and angry children that she surrendered more than 18 months ago to tour with her latest work, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

The international awards were still to come, drunken Brit audiences were yet to shower the series of 10 vignettes with bleary-eyed approval and a representative from Brad Pitt's production company, Plan B, was still to email for front row tickets to the show.

The "deliciously dark and strangely beautiful " play, as one critic dubbed the loosely-linked stories, is her debut work for London-based theatre company 1927 that comes to Masterton on March 8 to end a phenomenal run of tours through Britain, Singapore and Australia and to New York.

The Wairarapa performance is part of the 2010 International Festival of the Arts On The Move programme and features Andrade as actor, director and narrator in a work written alongside animator Paul Barritt, music director Lillian Henley and costume designer Esme Appleton.

"We all gave up our day jobs to go on tour. I was a learning mentor for three days a week and the kids can be so funny and inspiring. I would definitely like to go back there some time. It can be very rewarding," she said.

She said the awards and critical accolades for the play were unexpected although the company "knew the audiences would like it. We'd played enough drunk Friday night audiences at home and still kept them from the bar. That was a very good sign".

The sinister comedy fugues through hapless cats, gun-toting gingerbread men and evil twins, and captured five awards during its premiere season that included a clean sweep of the top awards at Edinburgh Fringe.

Andrade was raised in the Cheshire village of Prestbury before studying acting at Bretton Hall College in Yorkshire. She said the play, although written largely for a metropolitan audience, focuses on the shadow life and secrets of a small community not unlike Prestbury.

"My mum's friends came to see it and they asked her what sort of childhood did I really have. But it all comes from deep in my imagination I guess, and they apparently enjoyed themselves all the same."

She said besides a yearning for the classroom, she is also looking toward radio and "stripping away the visuals" for upcoming works and is also now writing a full-blown narrative play alongside Paul Barritt with the working title, The Animals and Children Took to the Streets.

"The whole show is set in a big tenement and it's less 20s, like Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, and more 1930s horror film with a lot of B movie inspiration going on," she said.

She said the creative corps behind Devil and the Deep Blue Sea are now writing and performing to their instincts after a time of playing "to audiences, critics and what people say".

"We're listening to our own creative voices again. We were trapped a bit I think but we've come out now and can see the light again."

Tickets for the Masterton Town Hall performance of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea are available at Ticketek and cost $45.

Other Festival of the Arts performances in Wairarapa set down for March include The Tragical Life of Cheeseboy play and the "dancing drums" show from Echoa.

For more information and festival updates go online to www.nzfestival.nzpost.co.nz