Burns Fellow Victor Rodger and actor Robbie Magasiva go back a long way. They tell Rebecca Fox about an upcoming reading of the play Sons.
Once Robbie Magasiva played the son, now he is playing the father.
‘‘In my wildest dreams I never thought that day would ever come,'' Magasiva (Wentworth, Shortland Street, Sione's Wedding) said.
• Show keeps actors on their toes
Magasiva, who is in his 40s, is visiting Dunedin this weekend to read the part of the father in playwright Victor Rodger's Sons, 18 years after he first starred in the play.
‘‘It's a full-circle moment for us. How time has flown,'' Rodger said.
The pair first met due to Sons and have since gone on to work together many times.
Magasiva remembers when Rodger first approached him, leaving him a note after his first theatre production in the 1990s - Circa's Heretic, where his role was to take his shirt off and have sex with Jennifer Ludlum (Leanne on Shortland Street).
‘‘That was it, my introduction to professional theatre.''
Rodger suggested Magasiva might like to read for a role in a play he was rewriting, Sons.
‘‘It just blossomed from there.''
The pair went on to star as ‘‘half brothers'' in 1998 in a production that earned Magasiva and fellow ‘‘brother'' David Fane Chapman Tripp awards, Best Actor and Best Newcomer, respectively. Rodger won best new writer and Sons itself won Best New New Zealand Play.
Given Sons was autobiographical, in that it was based on Rodger's own search for a relationship with his father that he had never lived with and half-siblings, it was an emotional time.
‘‘I had half-siblings I knew about but they didn't know about me. I took matters into my own hands and met them but didn't tell them who I was. It was all pretty dramatic.''
Writing the play helped him make sense of everything and launched his career as a playwright, he said.
While the first draft was very much goodies and baddies, with him in the role of goodie and his father in the role of baddie, a workshop on the play helped him see different points of view and made him realise everything ‘‘was not so black and white''.
‘‘Dad was human and made choices that had consequences. We are all human. I don't come out smelling of roses.''
However, despite this, his father died last year without seeing the play.
‘‘We made peace a few years ago.''
One of his half-siblings had seen the play. He came back after the show and said he didn't know whether to hit him or hug him. He just said ‘‘you're a hard man, Victor''.
Magasiva was looking forward to reading the role of the father in Dunedin this weekend.
‘‘It's a wonderful play. I hope we get to put it on again.''
Most of his theatre work had been done with Rodger, as they were ‘‘in sync'' with each other.
When he wanted to play an evil character, Rodger wrote one for him in Club Paradiso, performed in 2015 at Basement Theatre in Auckland.
‘‘He was beyond evil. I had never experienced anything like it. People talk about the darkness but I had never been there, to the edge where you can switch - it was scary. It took a month for the cast to recover.''
The pair had also worked together on other productions - Ranterstantrum in 2002, My Name is Gary Cooper in 2007 and At the Wake in 2014.
Rodger also wrote for Shortland Street when Magasiva was playing Dr Maxwell Avia.
